


A Dimension for Dance

by Alien_Ariel



Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Can't believe I forgot that one, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical Drug Usage, Cutting, Drug Abuse, Eventual Smut, F/M, I should mention spoilers, Masturbation, Oh, Oral Sex, Reader is a mutant, Reader is a psychic, Songfic, Suicidal Ideation, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, alright I think that's enough tags fuckin hell, alright and now for the fun tags, also should tag that this is not to be used as a basis to self-diagnose, and macking on someone else's husband, au where farouk took rudy's body instead of possessing oliver, au where rudy almost dies but not quite, bad habits, but don't worry that isn't depicted as morally right, but it's legion so there's gonna be some hella dark stuff at times, but it's like sad masturbation, canon-typical mental illness talk, cause psychics, content warning mostly for, eh, haven't watched three yet so, kinky mind sex, making out in the astral plane is wild yo, more an OC than reader but writer's gotta cover her bases, name and personality, not a slow burn, please talk to a doctor if you feel confused or concerned about your mental health, reader is diagnosed with BPD but the diagnosis is supposed to be wrong ya'll, spoilers for all of season one and most of two, this is just going to be a minific of like six chapters, this isn't canon-compliant anyway, which is to say that no one actually has mental illness but the discussion is there
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-29
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-07-25 06:20:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20020516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alien_Ariel/pseuds/Alien_Ariel
Summary: Liza knew that there were other people—people like her—somewhere out there. She knew, because they came to her.Like dandelion seeds floating in the wind.Like a skittish fawn approaching an outstretched hand.Like ghosts misplaced from their graves.They would come to her—all manner of people. And her Spaceman was one of them.It wasn’t until she was quite a bit older that Liza realized that “Spaceman” wasn’t quite the correct term for her fly-by-night, imaginary best friend. “Diver man” or “Jules Verne enthusiast” would have been more appropriate. But regardless, he’d first came to her when she was six years old and in the direct middle point of her space phase: So Spaceman he had forever remained.------------------------------------------Liza's Spaceman was the singular constant in her life, even when she grew up from the little girl obsessed with space—far too old to talk to people no one else could see. Yet, he was real to her because of this.But what she honestly wasn't expecting was that he was real to other people, too.





	1. Exposition

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone! Thank you for checking out my fic.  
I've been bingeing Legion like fuckin crazy lately and I couldn't help falling in love with Oliver. He's just the perfect dork: the exact point where uncool beat poet and hilarious, well-meaning husband meet. And while I like his relationship with Melanie fine--I am also a thirsty mfucker and want to write indulgent smut for my boy. SO here we are.
> 
> Please note an specific warnings for each chapter, which I'll post in the chapter summaries. This show gets hella dark and you can't shy aware from that when writing in this universe, so please be prepared. If it sounds like something you can't handle, please don't tempt fate. The fun stuff will be totally separate in chapter four, so you don't have to miss out on that. Also, if that's just what you're here for: I gotchu. Chapter 4.
> 
> I hope you all have a lovely day! Thank you for stopping by, and please enjoy.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **CONTENT WARNING:**  
Ok kids, this is Legion, so there's going to be a lot of talk of mental illness in this fic. A lot of it is front-loaded in this chapter because it recounts Liza's life up until the events of the show. She _is_ diagnosed with a very real mental illness, but, I cannot stress this enough, _please do not use this fic as a means to self-diagnose_. The point of the mental illness for psychics is that the diagnosis is wrong. Liza does not have BPD, which is why her symptoms are wrong.
> 
> There is also a sizable chunk of this chapter that deals with drug abuse, being committed to a mental hospital, cutting, and domestic abuse. If that is triggering for you, please skip down to the next page break.

**A Dimension for Dance**

_Chapter 1- Exposition_

_ [“Waste” by Foster the People](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbEVzpdOlVg) _

> ** _I'll hold your hand when you are feeling mad at me_ **  
** _Yeah when the monsters they won't go_**  
** _ The windows, they won’t close_**  
** _ I'll pretend to see what you see_**
> 
> ** _How long, I say how long, will you re-live the things that are gone?  
Oh yeah the devil's on your back but I know you can shake him off_ **

* * *

It wasn’t until she was quite a bit older that Liza realized that “Spaceman” wasn’t quite the correct term for her fly-by-night, imaginary best friend. “Diver man” or “Jules Verne enthusiast” would have been more appropriate. But regardless, he’d first came to her when she was six years old and in the direct middle point of her _space phase_: So Spaceman he had forever remained.

Her Spaceman had visited her a lot when she was a child—much more often than in her more recent years. Liza had her own theories as to why: The manifestation of her powers was sudden and uncontrollable, and, thusly, stronger then; Her teen years were a spotty mess of faded and missing memories, like so many holes in a motheaten sweater or a good piece of swiss cheese; That she’d been medicated into almost complete “normalcy” right about when she’d met Marcus. All these things.

All equally possible an explanation. All equally conjecture, as no one would even bother to humor her by believing she was psychic.

No one to talk theory with, because she was alone.

Well, alone at least in this part of the vast nothingness and nowhereness that is the American Midwest.

She knew, very well, that there were other people—people like her—somewhere out there in the space beyond her walls. Her town. Her dimension. She knew, because they came to her.

Like dandelion seeds floating in the wind.

Like a skittish fawn approaching an outstretched hand.

Like ghosts misplaced from their graves.

They would come to her—all manner of people, like her in that they too were different—and she would ask them things; it was a game for her. Her favorite game.

It was a game because there was no actual communication; it was all pretend, each side trying to interpret what the other was saying, as no sound could pass through the divide between. Liza’s ghost friends couldn’t answer her questions or respond to her stories; they had a semblance but no voice. And it was the opposite of how Liza felt about herself: all thoughts, words, voice, but no body to do anything with. No presence. No autonomy.

When she was with her ghost friends—when they came to her through that darkness, faces and hands and torsos illuminated by those drifting pinpricks of green light, like fireflies—when she was talking to them, she felt whole. They were whole, complete, together. Intact.

She knew the Spaceman understood. And that’s why he was her favorite.

While some of her ghost friends ignored her, running around their dark little mind prisons and trying to find the exit, the Spaceman always gave her his full attention.

While some of them screamed and raved, their bodies dilute of color and forms flickering like candleflame in the wind, her Spaceman was silent, focusing on the stream of consciousness coming from her contemplatively, if unhearingly.

And while most of the ghosts were temporary friends, never again appearing to her once they left, her Spaceman always returned. Remembered her.

She swore he had sought her out at times.

He was a constant companion to her as a child, even if the span of time between his visits did broaden over the years.

But then Liza grew up. Became a teenager.

It was then when everything started to go wrong.

* * *

> ** _And every day that you want to waste, that you want to waste, you can_ **

Puberty was havoc on her powers. It was havoc in general, apparently, as Liza was the only one like her at her school and yet all her peers seemed to be losing their minds as well. But it was worse, so much worse, for her.

At the best of times, Liza felt like a consciousness adrift: a mind untethered; her body existing in a different dimension from her and her sense of self. Her actuality.

But now, it was like her body had been hijacked. What had once been a vague presence in her life was now a petulant, demanding force. Liza felt like she’d been shackled to a baby—a starving, mouthy, inconsolably miserable, aching baby—like the one that mother she’d see sometimes on her trips to the hospital: The one that seemed much too young, and certainly much too frightened. She was afraid of everything, but especially men, and most especially her own baby.

The doctors had told Liza to stop asking about them. Both of them.

So Liza, now twelve-years-old but apparently too young to be developing as she was but doing it anyway, had found herself chained to something she was terrified of and confused by. She was told it was the miracle of the human body; that she should rejoice, because she was becoming a true woman; and that, failing her ability to be happy in this moment, she could at least take solace in it being a short-lived experience she’d outgrow.

Well that was all well and good, but for the meantime Liza was trapped with this ill-behaving being—unable to rid herself of it because, like the baby of the scared woman at the hospital, it was part of her. She was told that it was natural, a blessing, a reward for growing up; so she could not give it back.

You can’t return puberty to sender.

And honestly, puberty—or rather, her hormones—was making her so angry _all the time_ that what she _actually_ wanted to do was _hurl_ puberty back to sender.

Liza often wondered now, more than a decade later, if her Spaceman could have helped her through this phase of her life, but there really wasn’t any way to know now.

On the off chance that Liza was coherent (ie: lucid and sober) enough to think of him, she would stare at the stretch of her bedroom wall perpendicular to her bed where he usually appeared.

Sometimes she’d call him, even though he couldn’t hear.

Sometimes she’d cry, even though he couldn’t see.

Sometimes she’d beat on the wall, even though he couldn’t feel.

But then sometimes, after all her calling, crying, and hysterics, almost always when she just let her mind wander, he’d come.

He mostly came to her at night now, when she was drifting in that warm, numbing place between consciousness and sleep. Not wanting to wake her parents—who had started to see her ramblings of the Spaceman as more unusual now that she wasn’t a child—Liza would slide silently from her bed and sit on the floor before the wall that separated them. Sit there and just... think at him.

On her side: the warm, orangey glow of her nightlight that she still slept with; piles of pillows and blankets in every corner like the rolling hills of places far away she would probably never see; books, loose papers, scattered clothes covering the floor like a second carpet; the detritus of a teenage girl uncomfortable in the skin she couldn’t shrug off.

On his: the same unchanging void where only the fireflies, the ghosts, and he, her Spaceman, could live.

And the bridge that connected them: her mind.

While Liza couldn’t physically speak anymore without drawing unwanted eyes, she could still talk with her mind—not her brain, but, rather, something even deeper.

And she knew her Spaceman understood, just as he always did.

Even if the divide garbled, encrypted, her thoughts like it did speech, she knew he understood her, because he would sit, cross-legged the same as her, like a mirror, and he would listen.

And, perhaps, this might have been enough to save her. No—Liza was _sure_ it would have been. But the problem wasn’t her Spaceman, it was instead all the time between: the time when he wasn’t there.

There were too many hours alone.

Too many moments of sunshine, when all she wanted was the peace of night.

Too much time to have to be functional and singular, when all she wanted was to extrapolate herself—allow her mind to expand and trickle away, branch in a million different directions, unendingly, like a fractal.

The drugs were there for her when her Spaceman wasn’t.

Liza knew it wasn’t his fault for being gone longer and longer each time. It was her own addled brainspace pushing him away, making it harder for her to be found, for the ghosts to come. But, at the time, she had decided any moment where she could just release was better than the pain of enduring—the pain of waiting.

An entirety of not feeling, of being gone, was easier to cope with, even if it never once brought her the same joy as chasing her ghosts. Because for every day she'd had to wait for them to come, the silvery-white scars on her left thigh got a little deeper. Every month spawned a few more, all perfectly parallel to each other—pushed ever closer together, carefully so, so they wouldn't extend past the line of her shorts.

Eventually she was so far under that her Spaceman was the only ghost that could find her—no one else could come—and even then it was such a random happenstance when he appeared that Liza wondered whether he had been searching, or if it had been an accident.

The last time she remembered him finding her in the fog was as she was starting to come down and preparing to spike once more: pill raised halfway to her mouth and frozen in time as she watched him watching her. He didn’t sit. He didn’t wave. He just looked... sad. Even behind his helmet.

And then he was gone as Liza’s door was bashed inward on its hinges and she was carried away through it to the hospital, like some horrible portal conjured from her own worst fears.

The entire time in the hospital, her Spaceman never once visited. It wasn’t possible. The drugs here were less the feel-good far-away drugs of her teen years and more the suffocating-under-a-pile-of-rocks kind.

This was “medicine.”

Because Liza was “crazy.”

The nurses that forced the pills down her throat when she wouldn’t swallow were supposed to call it “borderline personality disorder.”

But they just said “crazy.”

Liza would believe many things other people said about her: that her hair was weird and off-putting; that her glasses were too big for her face and made her already small eyes look even smaller; that she should take her headphones off and actually listen to the people around her because it was rude to tune out life.

But crazy? Liza wasn’t crazy.

She also didn’t have “borderline personality disorder,” and she could’ve told you that even before her doctor heard her talking about her ghost friends and had quietly muttered under his breath that hallucinations weren’t typically part of the disease’s spectrum of symptoms. She knew it even before she told the doctor about feeling like a mind without a physical body, when he had rather quickly determined her to be dissociative—apparently the deciding factor in her diagnosis.

Well, that and her various dangerous habits and disruptive addictions, which were what had originally landed her in this place. Committed by her parents. Just to be given twice as many “medicines” per day over what she had previously already been taking by her own hand.

At night, there were no blanket and pillow piles spread around her room. There was no leaf-litter of books, paper, clothes. She wasn’t allowed a warm, orangey nightlight.

And, as she closed her eyes at midnight every night, she missed her Spaceman.

She would curse the medicine in her veins every night before slipping into unconsciousness, like a prayer, but she still knew she would have to give in to it to ever escape this place.

So she did just that.

Swallowed her pills and stuck out her tongue obediently for the nurses to check that she had.

Attended her group sessions; left her headphones in her room; engaged with her fellow inmates; stopped calling the other patients “inmates.”

Slept every night; ate at every meal.

Got a boyfriend—Marcus. Brother of one of the other inma—_patients_, who visited the hospital often.

Called normal people her friends now.

Stopped telling others about her ghost friends.

Missed her Spaceman privately, only in her mind.

* * *

> ** _And every day that you want to wake up, that you want to wake, you can_ **

She was out in two years. Both from dedicated hard work of will, and from turning eighteen and aging out of her parents’ care.

She kept the boyfriend but threw the rest away—her family, the hospital, the therapy they forced on her and the pills they shoved down her throat. Well, as far as Marcus and Dr. Rhys knew, she had also kept the regiment of medications she’d been put on during her outpatient care. But she made very sure they wouldn’t learn the truth. They didn’t need to know.

Liza could fake “normal” almost without flaw these days. Lots of practice.

And now, finally able to exist as she wanted, Liza felt her coming back to herself.

But her Spaceman _didn’t_ come back.

At least, not until she actually found herself looking for him less. Not until she found herself honestly enjoying Marcus. Until she realized she was in love.

Almost... violently in love. Hadn’t the doctors said rapid, infectious investment in relationships was one of her potential symptoms?

But Liza didn’t have BPD. She saw ghosts, even though her Spaceman didn’t want to come around anymore. She was a brain without a body, even when her Spaceman wasn’t around to connect with it and anchor her. She had real, meaningful relationships in her life now, so she didn’t need her imaginary best friend anymore.

She married Marcus in a hurry.

Didn’t need him—her Spaceman.

She had a husband now.

And that’s when he came. Only then. Once Liza was a decade into a marriage so picturesque and ideal to her that she could barely believe it was her life. Once Liza was adjusting, actually acclimating, to being... normal.

But Liza was just so happy, both with her new life and her Spaceman’s return, that she simply smiled as she met his gaze, laughing as she ran over to the mirror he’d appeared behind. She immediately started talking, telling him of everything he’d missed in his longest-ever absence.

At some point he seemed to notice something, focusing on her ring finger. Following his line of sight, Liza realized he was looking quizzically at her wedding ring as she gesticulated wildly in her excitement. Grinning from ear to ear, she held up her hand, pointed at him to show she knew he had been looking, then indicated the ring. His question hung in the dense air between them, his helmet almost reflecting his curiosity. Perhaps it was a change in the light at that moment.

Liza didn’t notice, didn’t hear the door creak open behind her. She just smiled and mouthed a single word back:

“Married.”

He seemed to startle, stumbling a little sluggishly, in that way the ghosts did—time dilated strangely between the two worlds. She giggled at him, suddenly struck by the weight of it too: being married. Being happy. Being mostly normal, but still while being herself.

“I’m so happy,” she repeated out loud, a tearful kind of disbelief tinging her voice. “And I’ve missed you so much. Please don’t—”

Leave. Leave was the word she’d have said next.

But Liza was suddenly being ripped away from the mirror she’d been staring into—whipped around to face Marcus. And the fury distorting his face into something ugly and foreign.

There was screaming: him accusing her of lying about continuing to take her pills.

And crying: mostly her, asking for forgiveness and saying that she wasn’t _her_ without her ghosts.

Then vitriol: Marcus saying she was hallucinating and damaged—incapable of love and incapable of changing herself to be with him the _right_ way. That he deserved better.

Next was the begging: Liza trembling from head to toe, motioning toward the mirror and imploring him to try—_just try_—to see what she did. To understand, like her Spaceman understood her.

And finally, violence: first Marcus shattering the mirror with his fist, and then bringing that hand, bloodied and surely already broken, against her face.

As she spun, forced through a loop from the impact, Liza saw one last cracked, fractured image of her Spaceman, reaching for her uselessly, before the mirror finally fell away and she herself fell to the ground.

She was down only a second before the deepest part of her mind—the part she called to the ghosts with—ignited. It ignited with the white-hot fury and unstoppable chaos of a star gone supernova. She _felt_ like a supernova: pulsing; powerful; angry; _vengeful_.

If she was going to end, she thought, she would at least scorch the earth around her as she went out, burning, burning, _burning_, burning down to nothing.

What stopped her was someone calling her name.

Someone—a man she did not know, had never once seen before—calling her name and telling her...

_Don’t._

_Stop._

_Breathe._

_Center._

No! Liza didn’t want to center—_never_ wanted to center. She wanted to expand, to extrapolate, to spread. She wasn’t a coordinate—finite, tiny, fixed—she was a fractal. She did not end. She did not shrink down to nothing. She did not want to be contained.

_Would that help you?_

Yes, it would. She just.

wanted.

to.

be.

her.

_Then expand_. _Just... don’t blow up._

Liza had never... been given permission like this before. And she was so overcome with emotions—gratitude, joy, confusion—that she wanted nothing more than to not disappoint this person. Ghost? He had come to her a bit like the others, but no one ever spoke to her. No one knew her name.

She wanted to meet this person. So badly.

So she let her mind go, spreading into every crack and crevice it could find in that misty, mysterious mental dimension. Sought out every place it could creep into, hide away in and explore—like icy water in a rare January thaw filling the potholes on the street she grew up on. And then she found him—a dirty blond-haired man wearing a tailored houndstooth jacket over a graphic t-shirt.

He didn’t even seem surprised she’d found him.

“You’re different. Like me. I can tell,” he spoke, and Liza swore she heard it with her ears just as much as her mind. “There’s a place for people like you—_us_—if you’re tired of feeling trapped in your own head.”

“It’s my body,” Liza sputtered, amazed by her own voice, how it echoed and wavered, “My body is what’s trapping me. But—but yes, I don’t... want to be alone. Anymore.”

She thought she’d already found the place where she could be—where she could _just be_. But she’d been wrong. Always wrong. Always different. Always alone.

He made a face—sympathetic and open—and Liza realized that she was crying. Somehow.

“You’ve never been alone,” he said, not unkindly—not like her was brushing aside her years of pain and hardship. But rather to say that people like her, like him, like _them_, had always been around. And even though Liza knew this—_had known_ it since she was a child, when her first ghost friend found her—it was still such an incredible comfort to hear.

“You can find us here—” And with a wave of his hand the information was suddenly in her brain, “—and we’ll be ready for you. And remember: do what you need to do to stay in control. Just don’t go too far and get lost.” Don’t blow up.

He was gone; she was returning. Marcus was screaming; she was picking herself up.

Now, seeing the bruise already forming on her cheek, he was apologizing rapidly, reaching for her; she was walking through their house in slow motion, thinking about the place she’d been shown.

This time it was him breaking down in tears, chasing her through the halls, following the trail she was practically burning into the hardwood floors; she was grabbing her headphones and music player—the only things she took, she needed—and then she was twisting the knob on the front door.

She was gone; she didn’t care that he stayed.

* * *

> ** _And every day that you want to change, that you want to change, yeah  
I'll help you see it through 'cause I just really want to be with you_ **


	2. Inciting Incident

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **CONTENT WARNING:**  
Mostly a warning for mentions of past instances of cutting. Not any more graphic than the passing mention it got in the last chapter. Also some minor mentions of drugs and drug abuse.
> 
> Also a broad warning for... adultery, I suppose? It is but it isn't. It doesn't go too far just yet. "Extramarital shenanigans" is more appropriate at this point in the story.  
While it doesn't carry the same weight as the previous chapter's warnings, I feel the need to mention that it's there in case it's upsetting for you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again everyone! I hope you're all having a great day. Just wanted to say a quick thank you for everyone who read and gave kudos on the first chapter. I'm mostly writing this for myself, but it's nice to know there are other people enjoying it as well.
> 
> I'm almost done drafting chapter 3, so that'll probably be posted this weekend. Hope you see you all back for chapter 3, and that you enjoy chapter 2! It's--heh...--my favorite. For now, at least.

**A Dimension for Dance**

_Chapter 2- Inciting Incident_

_ [“Sad Machine” by Porter Robinson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAIDqt2aUek) _

> ** _Is anyone there?_ **  
** _ (Oh) Hi!_ **  
** _ Who survived?_ **  
** _ Somebody new?_ **
> 
> ** _Anyone else but you?_ **  
** _ On a lonely night_ **  
** _ Was a blinding light_ **  
** _ A hundred leaders, will be born of you_ **

* * *

It happened like plot transition in a novel: one moment she was trapped in Indiana, and the next she was outside Summerland. It was as though she’d teleported.

Well, maybe she should be more careful with that word now, since some of the psychics—mutants—here actually _could_ teleport. She couldn’t teleport. Liza was just a psychic.

_Just _a _psychic_. Liza couldn’t decide if she wanted to laugh or cry.

She settled for smiling. The most face-splitting smile she’d let herself have since she was a child, not counting the time her Spaceman had found her after being gone for nearly ten years and she’d told him she had gotten married.

That was... two weeks ago. It felt like so, so much longer, though.

Maybe because she’d spent nearly every minute since arriving at Summerland going over her powers with the current head of the complex, Melanie. She was a nice enough older lady, with strikingly pretty blonde hair; but there was something under the surface of her that made Liza a little itchy and she couldn’t understand why, as Melanie had been perfectly receptive of her presence here.

Next she was being quickly shuttled into “memory work” with another mutant named Ptonomy, who dressed smartly and occasionally had a bit of a smart mouth too when he forgot to disguise it. Liza thought he might look even sharper if he wore glasses, but she didn’t feel comfortable enough around him to say so. Perhaps the reason for her putting up defenses around Ptonomy was due to how vulnerable he could make her in an instant—since he could enter her memories without almost any ounce of trouble and judge her for her entire life of mistakes.

Then Liza was next meeting Cary—well, Cary and _Kerry_, who were different people but also the same person. Although that was apparently an offensive oversimplification of their entire... situation. Apparently. Liza didn’t get it. But maybe she’d understand better after getting to talk with the two of them more; there wasn’t much discussion that could occur as she was allowing Cary Senior, the man component of the man-girl-shared-body hybrid, to monitor her every vital and her every measurement.

The rush in the latter part of her introductions came about in response to Liza’s second session of memory work, in which she was taken back to the first manifestation of her powers as a child. Liza had actually forgotten that her Spaceman was also the first ghost she ever saw, but she was excited to explain him to Ptonomy and Melanie. However, they already... knew him. And, after explaining how long he’d been coming to visit her for, Liza was immediately being given a more important job than just coming to understand her powers and train with them.

She was now, apparently, being given the task of returning her Spaceman to the physical world. Melanie had decided that Liza was the person to bring him home.

Because it seemed her Spaceman wasn’t just hers: He was Oliver Bird, original founder of Summerland and Melanie’s long-absent husband. And Liza’s lifelong bond with him, along with her similar attachment and familiarity with _the astral plane_—is that firefly place the ghosts always appeared in?—might be enough to get him to return to the physical world.

And so, despite being extremely unfond of medications—especially medications that made her go under—Liza agreed to having Cary hook her up to more medical monitors than she could count. She agreed to the four different needles he stuck in her arms, to the burning, itchy poisons quickly flooding her bloodstream that would make her body weak but her mind—her powers—more active. She agreed because she wanted to help.

Help both her new family of mutants, as well as help her Spaceman—Oliver, she supposed.

It was odd to her to consider that he had a name aside from the one she’d given him. She wondered what other things she’d learn about him now.

As she started to fall under and her mind slipped away to that dark dimension of her ghosts, Liza wondered... if he was handsome.

* * *

> ** _And though I know, since you’ve awakened her again_ **  
** _ She depends on you, she depends on you_ **  
** _ She’ll go on, and never speak of this again_ **  
** _ We depend on you, we depend (I depend) on you_ **

When next she opened her eyes, Liza was inside an inky, empty place devoid of everything except—

“Fireflies,” she croaked, both from using her voice for the first time here but also from surprise that she _had_ a voice. Holding her hands to her face, she could see that she did, indeed, also have hands. And a face as well. She had a body, all the way down to her feet, and for the first time ever it actually felt like... _hers_.

She turned her body—_her body!_—and came face to face with her Spaceman. She opened her mouth—_her own mouth!_—to greet him, a smile overtaking her face, but he raised a finger up to the grate of his diving mask and held it there. She nodded in understanding before he turned one hundred-eighty degrees and began to lead her away, pausing only to grasp her hand and gently tug her along behind him.

It wasn’t until he brought her before a black iron ladder, made of perfectly stacking circles, that Liza realized time didn’t quite work here in firefly land—the astral plane.

Which might be why it felt like it took no time at all to reach the bottom of what looked like a gigantic ice cube, despite it being maybe hundreds of feet above the “ground.” Her Spaceman had gone up first, perhaps so he could gallantly reach down through the trapdoor entrance to pull her up by the hand. And no sooner was she looking around the posh interior, the trapdoor vanishing beneath her to reform with the floor, than her Spaceman was undoing the clasps keeping his helmet attached to his suit and lifting it off his head to set on a coat tree in the corner.

Oh... he _was _indeed handsome.

She might have been blushing slightly in embarrassment at her own thought, because an almost roguish grin overtook his face before he was crossing the distance between them and holding her face in his hands, still contained within his suit.

And next he was kissing her.

Not only kissing her so suddenly that Liza lost her voice, but with such misplaced passion that she couldn’t help melting into it.

“Oh, my dear,” he muttered between burning kisses in an accent Liza, in all her sheltered ways, had only ever heard in movies, “Oh how I’ve missed you.”

Every utterance was like a prayer, like the noise of delight a man dying of thirst makes once water again touches his lips.

“It’s been torture, not being able to remember you or your name. But once I saw you, the happiness in your face as you showed me your ring: I knew.”

Knew what? Something was tickling at the back of Liza’s mind like his salt-and-pepper beard was tickling her face, and then her ear as he moved to kiss her there, fingers threading through her hair and holding her so tightly.

“And the children!” he breathed, moving to her neck and drawing a moan from her, “They look just like you, dear.”

What children? He and Melanie didn’t have any children, at least not that she’d mentioned—wait. _Melanie_.

The tickle in her mind was screaming at her now—screaming in anguish. And Liza so desperately wanted to ignore it as he, _her_ Spaceman, moved a hand to the small of her back and once more claimed her mouth, groaning into her as she reflexively bit his lower lip.

“The older one—” he gasped as she began to move against him, “—she’s a little troubled. But the little one is so sweet; she lights everything up when she talks to me. And you—” he again cut himself off to push her against the wall, which was deliciously freezing on her hot, fevered skin, “—you are so incredibly beautiful, my love.”

Liza could count on one hand the number of people that had told her they loved her—and she’d still probably have some fingers to spare. To hear her Spaceman say that word... it was Liza’s complete undoing. And she felt an emotion explode within her so devastating in power that she couldn’t contain it.

“I love you, Spaceman.”

Christ but she didn’t want to say it. If she were honest with herself, Liza _knew_ she loved him—the man that had been with her at every point in her life, even when her own family had given up on her. But still, she should never _say _it!

Especially because her Spaceman, apparently, wasn’t hers at all.

“I love you too, sweetheart. There’s no need to cry!” He was laughing lightly, sweetly, as Liza felt fingers wiping tears from her face. “’Spaceman’ is new, though.”

“W-what?” she hiccuped, closing her eyes and leaning into his touch as he kissed away her tears.

“What you called me just then. I always thought you and our girls were calling me ‘Peace Man.’”

Our girls?

“The older one doesn’t say it as much, but the little one—I adore it when she calls me that. Always with that adorable smile, with her missing front tooth.”

Liza... Liza remembers having a missing front tooth for a longer time than usual as a child. Something about the tooth splitting when she’d slammed head-first into some playground equipment and needing to be surgically removed; and that her adult tooth had taken forever to come in, leaving the gap for nearly a year.

“And her sister—dearest, she is _hurting_. We have to talk to her about the drugs—a little is... _fine_, believe me—but that, and the blacking out, and then the _cutting_. I just...”

Liza cut herself as a teenager, and she had a landscape of thin, white scars on her left thigh to prove it: like so many trophies for her award-winningly poor coping mechanisms. It was a horrible secret that she hadn’t told _anyone_ about—not her parents, not the doctors at the hospital, not even her Spaceman. But perhaps he could have seen...

“But you—you are _just_ as I remember. Well, if I could remember. I _swear_ it,” a heat was entering his voice and his ministrations were slyly shifting from comforting to teasing. “Sweet, beautiful, smart, loyal...”

Was she those things? Liza couldn’t be sure, as she was currently engaged, physically, with another woman’s long-lost husband.

“So, so beautiful,” he whispered, lifting his gaze from her slightly swollen lips to stare into her eyes, “We have so much catching up to do, my love.”

They did, but they didn’t.

“So let’s get caught up, yes?”

She should say no, but his hands were on her hips; his knee was spreading her legs and rubbing just so nicely against her; his lips were on hers; his tongue was in her mouth.

But his life wasn’t hers.

“Oliver,” she said, voice catching a little in sorrow as she forced herself apart from him, “I’m not—fuck... I think you have me mistaken for someone else.”

He stopped, confused by her sudden change in tone but not visibly hurt by her rejecting his advances. “Mistaken?”

“Oliver, tell me who you think I am.” She had an idea now, but it was better to be sure.

He stuttered, then moved his hands to cup her face, causing a bubble of sadness to rise up out of her. “You’re my wife. We have two children: a teenager with long black hair, braces, and some bad habits we need to help her with; and the little one, maybe six or seven, who talks more and dances for me when she’s in an especially good mood. And they both look exactly like you, probably to the point that I should be embarrassed for having such weak genes—”

Sensing a tangent coming, Liza recaptured Oliver’s attention and shook her head, tears falling from her eyes and clinging to her lashes. “Your wife’s name is Melanie.”

“Melanie? I feel like I knew a Melanie,” he muttered thoughtfully.

“And my name is Liza.”

No longer perplexed but instead shocked, Oliver removed his hands from her face.

“We don’t have any children. Those girls, the burnout teenager and the little girl who loved to dance with you? They were me. You’ve just been seeing me at different moments in my life.”

He took a step back and Liza could see the math being calculated behind his eyes.

“How old...?” he couldn’t finish, so Liza did her best to give him all the details.

“Still younger than you, even though you haven’t aged a day since I first met you when I was six. Cary said the same,” she said, choking a little as he drifted even farther away from her. “We met twenty years ago, Spaceman.”

Oliver faltered again, but in reaction to the nickname, not the time difference.

“Are... are you _sure_—that you aren’t my wife, I mean?”

She really didn’t want to say it again, so she just tilted her head sorrowfully at him.

He diverted his eyes, now mumbling more to himself than her, “But told Cary... so sure she’s Chinese...”

Did—did he mean her? Because, “I’m... I’m not—I just have dark hair, and my eyes are... well, I _am_ adopted so, potentially—”

“But your ring,” Oliver seemed to remember, coming to stand before her again and taking her hand, spinning the ring curiously. “You showed it to me, and—and the _joy_ on your face when you pointed to me...”

Liza squeezed her eyes shut as she cringed, realizing the mistake she’d made in that moment. _Of course_ he—the man who could remember nothing of his life outside what he saw in the astral plane, other than some vague ideas of who he was and what he’d had before—would make this assumption when a woman smiled so adoringly at him. That he’d draw this conclusion as she’d pointed at him, and then at her wedding ring.

Why hadn’t she realized...?

“I-I am married—_was_ married. I don’t even know now,” Liza sniffled, agony gripping her heart more from Oliver’s lovingly gentle touch than the memories of Marcus. “That man, the one who hit me? He was—”

“That scum had no right to hit you, love.”

“Please—” Liza stopped him, voice tiny and miserable, “—don’t. Don’t call...”

“But I love you.”

Gods, it was like both fire _and_ ice in her heart to hear that. “You can’t—”

“Of course I can. And I do,” Oliver interrupted, petting her hair, “I love you, and I’ll say it.”

“You _can’t_ say it,” Liza said more forcefully, “You have a wife and she’s waiting for you to come home to her.” Oliver was silent a moment, his grip firm but sweet on her hand.

“Melanie, you said?”

Liza was disgusted with herself for feeling a spark of hope at the tone of complete unfamiliarity in his voice as he spoke her name. She just nodded at him.

“But I love _you_—I know I do. And you love _me_—you said it, my dear, don’t shake your head. But this Melanie... whatever she and I had before was twenty years in the past, and I can’t even remember it.”

“She’s never given up hope on you,” she cut off his implied line of reason that she may have moved on, “And Ptonomy said it’s possible you’ll remember everything once I get you out of the astral plane.”

He contemplated his next words for a moment, “So it’s possible I’ll remember my past life and also my time here?”

“Yes,” Liza faltered, trying not to cry harder as she admitted the next part, “But you may also remember your past and forget... all this.”

She had already endured the heartbreak of this possibility when she’d originally been told it; and she tried to keep any emotion from crossing her face now, so as to not alarm Oliver. Before coming here, she had no idea what he felt or thought, but now she wondered whether it would change anything.

“Hmm,” he made a noise before looking deeply into her eyes, lightly tapping her knuckles in an affectionate motion with his other hand before turning away from her. Liza sucked in a needy lungful of air, not realizing she’d been holding her breath. She closed her eyes and dipped her chin to her chest to collect herself, only reopening them when Oliver next spoke.

“Well if that’s the case,” he said, holding his hands out as if to say ‘what can you do,’ “Then I’ll just be staying here.”

“Wh—” What? That wasn’t one of the choices.

“So if it’s just as likely that I lose my memories of this place as it is that I keep them, it’s _also_ very possible I could lose _all_ my memories,” Oliver reasoned aloud as he wandered over to a fancy bar cart and fixed two glasses of a very dark liquor from a crystal decanter that seemed to just appear.

“What...”

“Confusion about our relationship aside, I’d still rather not take any chances. Playing a game of chance when it’s your entire sense of self on the line is a gamble only an idiot takes, love.”

Please don’t...

She couldn’t even say it out loud now.

“So, as of now I’m not seeing any reason as to why I should leave.” And he sat down in one of the plush, furry chairs set on either side of a glass coffee table. Liza came over, taking the drink he was offering her, before landing ungracefully in the other chair, knees together but feet every which way. Oliver was staring her down with a raised eyebrow, lips kind of pursed in a way obviously meant to be intriguing and sexy.

And while it was rather cute to Liza, she felt more confident with a drink in her hand and some space between them.

She smiled a little as she realized there was something terribly familiar about this setup, from when she was a teenager: her with some kind of mind-altering substance in hand; the wall between them, keeping them each in their own, separate dimensions; and him, being quiet but watching her closely. The only difference now was that she could see him—_all_ of him, rather, as he had at some point, somehow without her noticing until just now, removed the rest of the diving suit to reveal the neat, impeccably tailored and stylish cream suit underneath.

_Still handsome_.

Liza diverted her eyes and took an overly long sip of her drink. And it was very smooth, just like him and the look he was giving her.

But, unfortunately for her less rational or moral side, it didn’t have the same effect when he was farther away: when she’d have a whole two seconds to rethink her actions while she stood and crossed the room to grab him. He was still exceedingly attractive, but she was better able to maintain her control with her over here and him over there.

She met his gaze, unwaveringly, and took another sip of the liquor. “How much do you know about what just happened at Summerland?”

“Pfff,” Oliver released a noisy breath and shrugged, “There was a lot that happened, love. What specifically do you mean?”

“Well what’s the last thing you know about? Let’s start there.”

He relaxed into the chair, sitting off-center with an arm over the back. “Something about the Shadow King? Farouk. He was in David’s mind—attached like a parasite—and they were trying to separate the two.”

Liza nodded, “They succeeded.”

“So why the serious face, dearest?” Liza felt another smile twitch at the corners of her lips, both at being addressed with such obvious affection but also because there was just something funny, something charming—_disarming_, that was it—about Oliver.

“Well Farouk didn’t die, _that’s _why the serious face.”

“Certainly not, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”

Liza laughed, causing him to smile in kind. She took another sip before continuing, “Much too easy. Of course, he had to find another body to inhabit. Possess.”

Oliver looked a little concerned at that revelation, “Who?”

“Before my time there, so I’ve only gotten this story second-hand and incomplete: There was another mutant, name of Rudy, who was apparently very nearly killed by some guy named Walter, who is now _also dead_—this seems to be very _normal_ for Summerland, by the way,” she said, this time earning a chuckle from him.

“I have no memories to corroborate this.”

“Yes, conveniently,” Liza brushed him aside with a well-meaning grin to show she heard the hidden intent in his statement.

“No memories of anything from before coming here, so I mean...” And he was making a very cute but also very obvious face. Liza waved a hand.

“We’re not discussing that right now, Oliver.”

“Ooh, no pet name,” he pulled a face like she’d punched him in the stomach and stolen all the air from his lungs, “Am I in trouble, my dear?”

No, but if she didn’t regain control of the conversation _she _was going to be.

So, with a quivering heart, Liza pressed on: “Anyway, Rudy was only _just_ alive. Cary had put him in a medically-induced coma so that he might recover—”

“Which made him a very easy target for the Shadow King,” Oliver filled in the blanks and Liza nodded. Smart man.

“Exactly. So he absconded with Rudy’s body to do... _gods_ know what. David is safe and clear of his presence completely; the rest are as well—apparently they inadvertently passed him around amongst themselves before he was forced to take Rudy. But, if there’s a chance that he can be saved...” Liza drifted off, opening her hands wide and quirking the corner of her mouth in uncertainty. She reclined fully in the chair as she sipped the final bit of her drink, swiveling the chair from left to right as she watched Oliver’s face.

“They want my help in locating—or more likely _fighting_—the Shadow King.”

Liza shrugged, “I assume. I wasn’t really given the ‘why,’ I was just told the ‘do.’ But they did tell me you’re _the best_.” Oliver leaned forward, glass in hand but still very obviously untouched, and scrutinized her face. She’d been going for flattery—and perhaps a vague double entendre to bait him.

“So if you’re so new to Summerland that you aren’t even being given all the information,” he said it slowly, like he was thinking through it. Like Liza couldn’t tell he’d been dying to ask this of her for a while now. “Why’d they task you to retrieve me? If you also aren’t important to me _personally_... why send you?”

It was adorable that he thought he was being so clever. Liza couldn’t help but smile, “They looked into my memories and saw a lot of you there. I was chosen _because_ we have a bond.”

Oliver stood and pointed a triumphant finger at her, bypassing the table and coming to lean over her, hand on the back of the chair and forcing it to recline as far as it could.

“So you admit it, there _is_ a connection between us.”

“Of course there is. You’re my Spaceman and you’ve been with me nearly my whole life,” she said, smile catlike. But it was twisting a little in concern as Oliver came to hold her cheek with the hand not leaning against the chair.

“So _why_ are you denying it?” he asked pleadingly, looking so desperate that Liza almost didn’t know what to say.

It was her conscious that reminded her.

“I’m _not_ denying it, Oliver. It’s... it’s just not quite what you were expecting it to be,” she tried to say it kindly, holding her hand over his as his thumb brushed tenderly under her eye. “And I can’t take what isn’t mine. It’s not fair—to _either_ of you.”

Him... and Melanie. She may love her Spaceman, but she owed Melanie, as the leader of Summerland who had accepted her without almost any questioning, just as much of a debt. Maybe even more so.

They’d both saved her. Just in different ways, and at different times in her life.

Oliver considered her sincerity for a few quiet moments before leaning in, touching his forehead to hers, eyes closed, before finally speaking, “I’ll go back. You can be the hero that returns me to the physical world.”

“That’s not—” Liza started to say, fearing he’d horribly misinterpreted her.

“Ah ah, love,” he cut her off, keeping her still against him, “I’ll return, _but_—but, I’m not going to pretend I don’t feel anything for you. So, you’ll gain respect for succeeding in your task, even though I’m a man changed from how they knew me.”

She could understand the reasoning behind that because, if he was serious, then she may not otherwise survive the reactions of the others. She’d be a homewrecker. But, if she did this for them, at least a homewrecker that helped them.

Maybe it _would_ be better if he just stayed here after all. Fuck.

“That’s if you even keep your memories,” Liza choked, now almost trying to sway him against her task. Oliver grinned cheekily, seemingly seeing right through her.

“As if I could ever forget a beautiful girl like you,” he said, petting her hair once more but respecting the boundaries she’d put up since telling him the whole truth and restraining himself from kissing her as he straightened. Although, Liza didn’t have trouble discerning the look in his eyes.

Determined. Confident. And... more than a bit hungry.

“Alright, dearest, let’s get a move on,” he said, holding out a hand, which she took without further prompting. “I’ve got to see a man about a barbershop quartet.”

And with that strange but somehow also incredibly fitting line, they were waking up... somewhere else.

* * *

> ** _(Oh) Hi!_ **  
** _ I don’t know much about your life beyond these walls_ **  
** _ The fleeting sense of love within these god forsaken halls_ **  
** _ And I can hear it in his voice, in every call:_ **
> 
> ** _ “This girl who slept a hundred years has something after all.” _ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so Liza's original character design is almost based entirely on that throwaway line between Oliver and Cary; the one where Cary mentioned Melanie and Oliver was just like, huh no don't remember her but maybe she's Chinese I think? Dudes, I died laughing. I don't know why, but it just tickled me. And then the thought morphed more from just being a one-off joke to me thinking, well what would make Oliver think that? Was there a reason? Maybe there was something he knew that looked a little like that, and he thought _that_ person was his wife.
> 
> This story is also a bit of a fix-it for how Oliver returns to the physical world. I remember thinking, oh no he isn't gonna come back. How is he getting home? Who's keeping an eye on him? BUt it's all for nothing, cause he's just... awake now. lol
> 
> Anyway, that's all for now. Sorry to dangle the possibility of sexy times in front of you, just to yank it away. But we gotta do some character development before we get to that. It's only fair.  
also makes me feel a little better for writing a story about an already-married man and his not-wife fuckin goin at it


	3. Rising Action

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **CONTENT WARNING:**  
This chapter carries a warning mostly for a detailed depiction of female masturbation. It's like... _sad_ masturbation, but it's there. Might carry more of a warning because of that, honestly. Otherwise, pretty free-and-clear of troubling material.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello dears! Just a quick thanks for all the hits and kudos! I smile every time I see that counter go up, because it feels like I've found another person a bit like me. It's nice to know you aren't alone, as it were.
> 
> Today's chapter is going to be the longest one of the series because it has the most going on when it comes to character development (ie: me setting up why it's ok for Oliver and Liza to get together, hahaha). It's still a lot of fun and this is where I really started to feel like I got a handle on how to write Liza--just the right amount of sass. I swear, she's the most troublesome character I've ever had to write; but that honestly just makes it all the more rewarding experience for me. I hope you're all enjoying her and Oliver's dynamics, because that's my favorite part of this story. They've got good flow together.
> 
> Hope you all enjoy! So happy to have you all here! :)

**A Dimension for Dance**

_Chapter 3- Rising Action_

_ [“Music” by Mystery Skulls](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUyMQrOpyFw) _

> ** _ At least there's always (music) _ **  
** _ For the good times (music)_ **  
** _ For the bad times (music) _ **

** **

* * *

When Liza woke back up, she was almost alone. Cary was there, but he was passed out at his console behind the glass. It must be very late.

Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Liza acted quickly: sitting up and disconnecting the vast array of wires and tubes from her arms and forehead. She’d have to come back later to actually let Cary properly remove her IV, but right now she was feeling an itch that she simply had to take care of.

And that itch involved total seclusion.

If she were very lucky, the late hour might mean that her and Oliver returning to the physical world would go unnoticed. Well, probably just her. From what she’d seen of Melanie’s devotion to her husband, Liza very much doubted that she had gone even ten feet from Oliver’s cryo chamber since she had first been sent into the astral plane to collect him.

Rushing swiftly but quietly through the mostly empty complex, Liza stopped only to grab her headphones and music player from her bunk before heading toward the exit. She had first considered locking herself in one of the physical training rooms, but she was much more likely to be found there. She was hoping to prolong the coming confrontation, so she instead pushed through the doors and rushed into the woods.

After a few minutes of stumbling more or less blindly in the darkness, Liza finally found the spot she’d come to a few times already over her past week and a half at Summerland: a ten-foot clearing in the forest, nicely flat and devoid of trees or roots to trip her up. It was hard to locate, hard to see her inside, but easy for her to do her thing in.

And her thing—embarrassed as she was by it—was dance.

Liza loved to dance; Oliver commenting on it from when she was a child wasn’t chance: There was rarely a day that went by when she was young when she didn’t dance. She had to be alone to do it effectively, and she had to be wearing headphones, but it was a decent release for when she felt what she now identified as her powers building up too much inside her.

Breath still hitching from her hurry, Liza wasted no time in throwing on her headphones and turning on a random song. She tapped her foot for a few measures to get the beat, and then she let herself go.

It was a bit like letting her mind expand, when she tried to test her limits and push at those boundaries. But this was what she had to do when she knew letting her mind go would mean it never coming back to her.

Don’t blow up. David’s voice.

It was an accurate description of what would happen if she tried it right now.

Another song started, bleeding into the first so seamlessly that she didn’t need to adjust—she just kept going.

She felt the tension loosening from her muscles. Her stomach wasn’t rolling quite as badly. She knew that if she _were_ to let her mind go now, she could control it.

But she didn’t want the others to find her. Didn’t want to be traced. To be found.

So she just kept up her routine. Kept her mind as small and contained as she could. Let her body take over as the dominate force for now. Let it have control over her.

Another song, this one slower and more fluid.

Liza’s hands, up until now being gripped tightly against her headphones, keeping the pads pushed completely flush against her ears, finally loosened and rose above her head, her hips swinging from side to side.

Something tickled at the edge of her mind—little vibrations carried through the dead space of the mental plane. Like someone was waving at her through three feet of mud.

She had a good enough guess or two who it could be—flip of a coin which one it actually was. But she wasn’t exactly in the mood to talk to either option right now, so she ignored it and imagined a wall around her and her forest clearing: a prison of her own make, but one she could dissolve when she decided she was fit to be around other people again.

_Another song_, she thought. Not ready yet.

> _ [All the signs are pointing south tonight](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91djdwYFWS4) _  
_ We follow them to our demise in a tower of flame_  
_ And I can see headlights, I can see people_  
_ Waiting for direction_  
_ Secretly hoping we were both wrong_  
_ I hope we were wrong_

And so it went, taking the last dregs of Liza’s inhibition and, thus, her now spent frustration with it. Now it was just her doing something she loved, not something she needed.

When she was dancing, it was one of the rare moments in which she actually felt like a typical human—a being of both brain _and_ body.

> _Baby, I'll remember you always_  
_ Baby, I will wait for you always_  
_ We held the knife, we paid the price_  
_ Baby, I'll remember you, I'll remember you_

Her eyes were closed, so it was with total surprise that Liza screamed, suddenly feeling a hand on her hand. Reluctantly opening her eyes, she was not at all shocked, however, to find Oliver before her, holding her hand and posing as though he’d been dancing with her the whole time.

_Found you_. A voice in her head, drowning out all the sound flooding her ears.

She couldn’t even make a noise, either of relief or absolute mortification. But as it was, Oliver didn’t even wait for her to react before repositioning her hand in his to hold it above her head, spinning her around before next sending her circling away from him, her navy converse feet kicking up dead leaves and dust, before once more returning her to his tight embrace, swaying from side to side. Somehow—Liza imagined it was from his presence in her mind—he was keeping time perfectly.

A hand moved one cup of her headphones just enough to the side that he could whisper in her ear, “Your Spaceman is here now, dearest.”

* * *

> **_When you're in love (music)_**  
**_ When it's over (music)_**  
**_ When I'm on fire (music)_**

Liza hadn’t been allowed to run away, due mostly to Oliver dragging her back to Summerland by her hand but also in part from what she felt was a social obligation to the others.

So it came to be that she found herself to be the center of attention, thrust into the middle of the bunkroom for everyone to congratulate and thank her for a job well done. She was then introduced to the last member of the complex, one that had been mostly ignoring her: Syd. She did also officially “meet” David at this moment. He had put a hand on her shoulder and smiled kindly, softly, at her.

There was something... knowing about the face he made at her, as well.

Liza didn’t have much time to panic before she was being turned, one final time, to face Melanie. She looked... fine. The same. Which, while it was to say not any _angrier_ with Liza, she was also not... any happier.

Liza didn’t need to ask why. She could figure it out.

Oliver hadn’t remembered his past.

Oh gods, her heart ached for Melanie.

“You’ve done us—_me_—a wonderful service today, Liza,” she said, voice a little fragile like she might start crying at any moment, “I can’t... There’s nothing I can say to thank you enough. Truly.”

Liza, catching Oliver’s gaze over Melanie’s shoulder, simply swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded. She tried to smile as the other woman pulled her into a warm, grateful hug.

_Someone please save her._

At this point Liza was desperate for sleep, despite, according to Cary, spending nearly three days being unresponsive. She was really hoping everyone was thinking the same as her.

But no.

She’d now have to survive a party and meal, apparently. Oliver seemed very eager to cook for the rest of the Summerland residents, asking them questions about themselves as he worked. It was like the most bizarre game of twenty questions Liza had ever seen—and that’s coming from someone who, as a little girl, had habitually done more or less the same thing with astrally-projected psychics that appeared to her in her bedroom wall because they were inexplicably drawn to her.

She mostly let her mind wander, twirling a length of her hair around her finger and staring out the long line of windows in the dining area. Oliver was a magnet for attention—his charm and wit made it immediately obvious to Liza that she wasn’t the only one he’d won over within a second of being introduced—and it made it easy for her to fade into the background.

“Well I’ll certainly try not to get on your bad side, then,” Oliver said with a laugh at David, returning Liza’s attention to the matter at hand as he met her eyes and grinned at her spacey look. “And you, of course, I know already.”

Oh no. Please don’t do this now. Not just yet. If ever.

Liza’s palms began to sweat, her grip on the hem of her corduroy dress tightening.

“_So_—so you retained your memories from the astral plane?” Cary piped up, in the middle of cleaning his glasses but replacing the frames on his nose as he sensed an interesting topic of conversation.

“Certainly,” Oliver said, smile not faltering for a second even as he masterfully flipped his skillet and the omelet he was making slid through the air in a perfect arc. “I have many fond memories of my—_our_—dear Liza.”

While most of the others smiled at that, Liza could distinctly feel another set of eyes burning a bit of a hole in the back of her head. She scratched at her left thigh, nails racking over that specific spot she always hit when she was feeling dread fill her soul. It hurt, but she was too anxious to flinch.

“She’d be very upset with me to recount some of them in front of her friends, though.”

Now Liza was having to grab her own wrist to stop herself from causing a run in her tights.

_Please_, she thought desperately in Oliver’s general direction. A slight tilt of his head in her direction was the only indication that he’d heard it. _If you love me, you won’t be what causes me to lose this family now that I’ve found them._

Oliver’s hand stilled on the skillet, but he refocused quickly enough that the brief lapse in his attentiveness didn’t draw suspicion. “Childhood memories, of course. She had the cutest little smile; terribly embarrassed by that missing front tooth though, weren’t you, dear?”

But Liza wasn’t meeting Oliver’s eyes. She was sharing a pleading look with David, who had, apparently, _unfortunately_, heard it all.

“I... I have to go vomit,” Liza said to excuse herself for lack of any other excuse. But—honestly—she might actually do just that.

* * *

> ** _ Every good night (music)_ **  
** _ Every last time (music) _ **
> 
> ** _ At least there's always (music) _ **

Liza had managed to evade most everyone in the complex for about a day and a half before her avoidant ways were catching up to her. She was caught while trying to sneak some food out of the kitchen fridge late on the night when her luck finally ran out.

“Christ!” Liza breathed upon closing the fridge door, a wedge of cheese falling from her mouth to land on the small pile of crackers she’d made in her hands. Melanie was suddenly there, smiling at her but in a tight-lipped way. “Oh jeez. I’m sorry, Melanie. I just wasn’t expecting to see anyone in here at this time of night.”

Her smile pulled a little in a way probably meant to indicate warmth, but Liza felt chilled to the bone. And she couldn’t tell if she was just being paranoid, or genuinely perceptive.

“No, I suppose you weren’t,” she replied to Liza’s explanation of surprise, “Would you... like to _sit and chat_ while you eat?”

Despite there not being any hostility implied, Liza was feeling her heart gripped by fear at a request she could find no discernable way to deny. Mouth still hanging open, she clamped it shut before some ill-timed retort about her mother teaching her never to eat with her mouth open could escape her, simply nodding along with Melanie as she was led to the dining table.

“Please, eat,” Melanie prompted her suddenly, seeming to remember why Liza was there in the first place.

“Oh, uh—thank you.” Liza inclined her head slightly in thanks before nibbling nervously, like prey grazes on grass—eyes darting from side to side in search of predators. But in Liza’s case, she was trying to _avoid_ the predator’s gaze, rather than find it. In lieu of scratching at her scars, Liza held her snack with both hands and tapped the heel of her bare foot against the meticulously clean wood floor.

“You must be hungry. We haven’t seen you at meals for almost... well, since you came back from the astral plane,” Melanie said. Liza could feel the woman’s words slide into her brain like a very real probe, reading her mind and tricking her into saying something she didn’t want to reveal. Melanie was surely an excellent psychiatrist.

But Liza had experience with doctors, and she could stay ahead of the conversation if she concentrated. Hopefully.

“Y-yeah,” she stuttered, clearing her throat and trying to sound confident enough to avoid suspicion, “I’ve just... I’m still getting used to living around other people, you know?”

Melanie nodded and smiled slightly wider, “Understandable.”

Liza released a breath and put more cracker into her mouth, her bouncing foot slowly ceasing its nervous motion.

“I suppose I’m just... concerned,” Melanie continued, catching Liza off-guard. The cracker was suddenly as dry as dust in her mouth. “Because you’d been getting along with everyone _just fine_ before...”

As the moments ticked on, Melanie’s final unfinished thought coiled through the air like a snake, closing around Liza’s windpipe. She reached for her glass of water, fingers trembling a little but mostly unnoticeable once she was actually bringing the glass to her lips.

With Liza showing no signs of talking unless she was being forced, Melanie lowered her eyes to the table before bringing them back to meet Liza’s. “Did something... _happen_ in the astral plane?”

“Something like what?” Liza asked, reaching for another slice of cheese. But her fingers found only table, so she tried to make it look like that’s what she’d been intending to do.

For a few moments the only sound was Liza’s nails on the table. _Tap tap tap tap_.

Melanie’s eyes were trained on those tapping fingers, her smile fading into a tense line. Liza stilled, joining her hands together and lowering them to her lap, shoulders slumping and pushing inward, forward, as though to make herself smaller. More defensible.

“You only stopped interacting with the group once Oliver woke up.”

Liza ducked her head but couldn’t answer.

“You’ve known him for decades—called him your best friend—but his presence frightens you.”

It wasn’t a question, but, regardless, Liza couldn’t even summon a noise to try to defend herself.

“And you were the first one he sought out when he came back. He didn’t even...”

Those last fragmented words sounded like an error on Melanie’s end—the result of the building emotion in her voice.

“Can... can I go?” Liza asked, voice tiny and scared once Melanie was fixing her eyes back on her face. She just... she just wanted to go.

“You love him.”

Liza’s shoulders quivered as though those words had actually impacted her—flung at her like a very real rock, launched from a slingshot. “I can’t...”

“He loves _you_.”

This was much more accusatory than the previous, which Liza found curious—almost as though Melanie _expected_ other people to fall in love with her husband, but _never_ for him to love another, perhaps apart from her. Liza would surely have wondered more on this further, if she weren’t currently using every bit of her will not to stand from the dining chair and run. Run far, far away.

Run forever.

But... she didn’t want to run. She wanted to stay. She wanted this—wanted here.

She wanted to belong.

“Please,” she whispered miserably, not able to hold Melanie’s gaze, “I don’t—I won’t...”

“How long?” she pressed, causing Liza to shake her head, “Is this why it took three days for you return?”

“No that’s not—”

“Is that why he doesn’t remember—”

“Please!”

Liza was suddenly a mess, feeling like she was splitting into a million fractured pieces from Melanie’s pointed barbs. She couldn’t really even blame the woman, which might be the worst part. And she wasn’t even yelling, yet Liza could feel her words tearing at her skin, pulling on her hair, freezing the blood in her veins. She stood from her chair, palms flat against the tabletop, tears dotting its surface—reflecting the blue moonlight filtering in through the many windows like beads from a broken necklace, scattered about haphazardly but still pretty, in a sad kind of way.

“Please don’t misunderstand me. My _intentions_. I’ll stay far away, I won’t talk to him, I’ll keep to myself,” Liza begged, leaning into Melanie’s space to show her desperation.

Liza would throw herself to her knees, prostrate herself at Melanie’s—Summerland’s—feet if that’s what it took.

Just don’t—

Don’t make her—

“Just please—_please_—don’t make me leave! Don’t make me go back into that world that doesn’t understand me. Where I have _no one_.”

Shocked into silence, Melanie’s eyes scanned Liza’s face, twisted and distorted by a fear so complete that it caused the other woman to remember herself.

“You don’t have to leave,” she said, causing Liza to crumple, arms supporting her weight against the table so she wouldn’t completely collapse. “Just...”

“A-a-_any_thing,” Liza hiccupped.

“You shouldn’t be alone with him. Not anymore.” Not ever again. It was left unsaid but still made clear as day.

Melanie waited only for Liza’s last pitiful, tearful nod before leaving the other girl to her crying on the dining room floor. It was ok that she didn’t try to comfort her, because Liza... she didn’t want to be comforted.

* * *

> ** _ Saving my world (music)_ **  
** _ Saving my soul (music)_ **  
** _ Saving my girl (music) _ **

While Melanie had made it clear Liza was not to be alone with Oliver—with her husband, that was—she, thankfully, didn’t seem to have a problem with Liza being alone by herself. Which was a good thing, because she still required quite a bit of time to be on her own.

Especially because she was trying not to use her powers, which _thusly_ meant a lot more time spent in her forest clearing, dancing away her excess energy and nerves. Since coming to Summerland, almost as if in response to be near others like her, Liza’s powers had been “leveling up,” so to speak. She felt it pooling within her, recharging after each use, much quicker than it ever had before. Normally she’d be thrilled with this development, feeling like she was, every day, becoming more useful as a mutant. More herself.

But this was not the case, at least for now. Because, at the moment, what Liza really wanted was to _not_ have to curb her reserves of power on a twice-daily basis. It was now as much a part of her daily schedule like showering, eating, studying, memory work—so many things.

The reason she was attempting not to tap into her powers was because—maybe from his proximity now—Liza was finding it extremely difficult not to “bump into” Oliver, at least mentally.

He wasn’t above doing it to her in the physical realm as well, of course, but it was much more likely to happen in her mind. He was an incredibly powerful psychic, and the territory his mind could possess made it difficult for Liza to remain hidden from him. David, while even more powerful, was better at understanding where he was and was _not_ needed, so Liza didn’t have to beat him back quite as much.

Although he _did_ try. Occasionally Liza would feel his presence butt up against hers, like a friend playfully hip-checking her. Like her mom used to do when she’d start to fall asleep standing—Liza tended to suddenly lose all her energy all at once as a kid, and then she’d usually pass out for a power nap. She’d pretty much always send David away, but it was a comfort to know he did care; which might have been his intent: letting her know that. And that he’d listen if she needed to talk at him.

Liza got the impression that David was one of the _only_ people that wouldn’t criticize her—_hate her_—for the predicament she’d gotten herself into. Well... he _does_ know, if even just by accident. And yet he hasn’t treated her any differently.

He was a good friend.

Other than him, the only person Liza found herself comfortable enough with to be around for more than a few fleeting seconds of passing in the hall was Cary, who, surprisingly, was rather skilled at getting Liza to open up about herself. Eventually he even got her to reveal the big secret as to why she was suddenly much more distant and reclusive. He didn’t judge, which was a massive relief for Liza, but he also didn’t really have _any_ advice—Cary had never desired romantic relationships. Wasn’t his “area of expertise.” His words.

However, he listened well; he was an attentive ear for Liza to talk her troubles into.

And he had some great recommendations for music. When Liza shuffled through the playlist he’d put together for her, she honestly wondered how much of it was actually Kerry, though. The music skewed a little younger than she’d peg the sixty-year-old Cary for liking.

> _ [And I will work this body, I will burn this flame](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDvdyIfF-hM) _  
_ Oh, in the dead of night, and in the pouring rain_  
_ Yeah, I'm a workaholic and I swear, I swear_  
_ Yeah, one day I will beat you fair and square_

As Liza twirled, spun, punched her way around her forest clearing—her little sanctuary inside sanctuary—one especially sunny afternoon, she could understand why Kerry would find this music energizing. She’d have to remember to thank the younger girl—younger? was she actually younger?—the next time she caught her outside Cary.

Liza still didn’t understand their dynamics or their relationship, but she was starting to see the value in always having someone you could trust—someone you loved—close by.

...That was the wrong thing to think.

Almost simultaneous with her having that thought, Liza could feel someone tapping at her mind. It was Oliver. She knew because David would brush against her, but Oliver always knocked.

She threw up another door in her mind. Even if Oliver managed to open the first one—which would hardly be difficult for him—he’d at least still have to get through the second.

David had taught her a little about how to contain—_cordon off_—her own mind, if needed. According to him, the reason walls didn’t work—like the ones she’d put up to keep Oliver from finding her after she’d returned from the astral plan—was because walls didn’t have a top or a bottom. She’d penned herself in, sure, but she’d left herself open for someone to drop down on top of her.

So, instead, if she bottlenecked the entrance to her mind to a single point—which was very hard for Liza to do, mind you—she could control access _to_ her mind much more easily. Only one way to get in. Then she just had to close off that access point.

Thus: the door.

> _It ain't no matter of "if," honey, it's just a matter of "when"_  
_ Ah, some sunday when it's my face in the newspaper again_  
_ All the rag magazines, black limousines, they'll be getting in line_  
_ Yeah, it's just a matter of time, honey, it's just a matter of time_

He’d gotten through the first one now and Liza could hear him chuckling good-naturedly at the one directly behind it. He called something to her that she couldn’t quite decipher.

She put up another three doors.

> _Que ferais-tu?_  
_ Putain, je ne sais pas!_  
_ Ne viens pas pleurer vers moi_

Liza felt like she was being watched, but she was too distracted by both trying to put up doors as she was with maintaining her dancing so she didn’t go careening off into the underbrush that she couldn’t tell if it was someone watching her in her mind or someone in the physical world.

Huh. Maybe Cary _did _actually make this playlist—or parts of it, anyway. This next song was much more him.

> _ [You're always on my mind, instilled in my heart](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJGeUvkuFAA) _  
_ You're always on my mind although we are apart_  
_ You're always, you're always, always on my mind_

_Knock, knock._

Distracted. She had distracted herself and now he was right at the final door again, laughing genially at her attempts to keep him out. And he was making it look damn easy too.

Meanwhile, Liza was sweating in exertion now. But still she kept at it, futile as she would surely soon find her efforts to be.

> _And baby, the reason why I know I can't forget your face_  
_ 'Cause everywhere I go, I see you every place_  
_ You're always, you're always, always on my mind_

This song reminded Liza of her parents. How, when she was young, she used to sit on the couch watching them as they danced with each other to music like this. When she was still young enough that her stories of the Spaceman were still “cute” and not “troubling,” that is. They didn’t dance as much once she grew up, so they filled that empty time with fights instead.

But this song... it was a happy reminder.

It reminded her how she’d go looking for her Spaceman while her parents danced, and how she’d ask him to do it with her too, despite the music being distant, filtering in through her bedroom door from the adjacent living room stereo. Despite him not being able to hear her even asking it. Despite him not even really being able to move that well in his diving suit.

Despite all that, Liza would dance. Smiling the entire time.

> _Life is so empty alone with a broken heart_  
_ Please, please tell me_  
_ Honey, why, why did we have to part, oh?_

Ok Cary, this was starting to feel like sabotage.

Liza’s feet stumbled as she felt a stab of heartache slam against her body. Likewise, a whole set of her doors slipped away and Oliver was right at her mental threshold once again.

She was a bit more forceful than she probably needed to be as she pushed him back, imagining a giant, steel-plated, code-encrypted vault door. She’d be safe in her little prison now; a door like that would keep him out, or nothing would.

Surely.

> _You know it's you I love, to my heart, you hold the key_  
_ I pray the stars above, oh, that you hurry back to me_  
_ You're always, you're always, you're always on my mind_

This was definitely sabotage. Now all Liza could think of was keys.

And suddenly her extra-large, fuck-off vault door was growing a conspicuous keyhole that Oliver very easily summoned a key for.

And then he was in.

_Hello, love. You can open your eyes now._

Almost stubbornly, Liza kept them closed. Oliver smiled at her—it was more of a feeling than something she actually saw in her mind like this.

_You’re a cheeky girl. One of the reasons I’m so taken with you._

Liza huffed, her physical body stilling so she could better focus on Oliver’s teasing of her. If she tried to do too many things at once, she was going to trip and sprain her ankle.

_But why are you being so willful, I wonder?_

“Because I already know what I’ll see if I do,” she spoke aloud, earning herself a full-bodied laugh from Oliver, which she felt in every corner of her mind. It wasn’t unpleasant: it was just all-encompassing. Next thing she felt was someone lifting her headphones from her ears, settling them to sit around her neck.

The thing that finally got her to open her eyes was that same someone brushing a length of hair behind her ear, his fingers giving her skin just the slightest of caresses.

“Ah, so she _does_ sometimes listen,” Oliver teased her, face so impishly playful before her that Liza very nearly smiled at him.

But then she remembered herself.

“You can’t keep finding me like this,” she chastised him, even despite knowing full well that he had no idea why she’d been avoiding him the past two weeks.

“Well not if you get any better at keeping me out, I won’t.” He said it like a joke—like this was some game of cat and mouse they were playing.

“You were here before you even got into my mind,” Liza shook her head, “I could feel your eyes on me.”

He held his hands up in surrender, smile coy. “I was just watching. I _like_ to see you let loose—so genuine that it’s charming. What can I say?”

Liza had no response to that other than a deadpan expression, eyebrows raised and eyes lidded. Oliver continued, “But my dear, I do believe you are playing _hard to get_.”

His hand was suddenly on her cheek. Or, maybe, she had only just noticed it—only once the cold, steely feel of his wedding ring started to siphon the warmth from her skin, like a leech.

“I am not ‘playing hard to get’ because I’m _actually_ ‘not even something available to get.’”

Oliver just smiled wider. She should know better than to sass him. He just liked her more for it. Called her “feisty.”

“Says the feisty,—” _ding, there it was_, “—beautiful girl holding my hand.”

Damn it, and she was.

Liza quickly pulled her hand away from his, bringing it away from her cheek as well. But he just moved nearer to close the distance between them instead.

“Oliver,” she warned, trying to look stern, “Either you need to leave or I’m going to have to.”

“Why? Why can’t I stay?” he questioned innocently, “I was enjoying watching you dance, after all. Just don’t understand why you use the headphones—makes it harder to hear unless I’m—”

“—unless you’re in my mind, yes I know. And I just _prefer_ the headphones, ok? I don’t want to get into it right now.”

Oliver considered her impatient tone and pouted, “You’re upset with me, dearest. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“No, I’m not—” Liza sighed, rubbing the heel of her palm into her temple, messing up her hair, “I’m not mad at you. It’s just—I can’t be here right now. With you.”

Oliver smirked a little, attempting to lighten the mood, “Goodness, I didn’t realize this was a ‘no Liza and Oliver’ section of the grounds. There really ought to be a sign posted!”

Liza made a noise of frustration as he reached over to smooth her bangs out of her face.

“It’s because I’m not allowed... Because I _shouldn’t_ be seen alone with you, ok?” Liza amended quickly, “Not just here, Ollie, but _anywhere_.” She tried to make her desperation for him to understand obvious but without inviting the opportunity for further discussion or quibbling. But as always, Oliver saw what he wanted to in her words first, and everything else second.

“’Ollie,’ hmm?”

Liza groaned as loudly as she dared, rolling her eyes at the adoration in his.

“I do adore your little pet names, love. Makes me feel quite the blushing schoolboy.”

“_Oliver_,” she said stubbornly, “Please. Were you even listening?”

“Well of course I was,” he replied with mock offense, “And if anyone here thinks they have the right to tell you, a grown woman, what you are and are not _allowed_ to do, I think I’ll need to have a word with them about that.”

Liza didn’t doubt that he would, but she absolutely did not want that. “No, Oliver. The only person you need to ‘have a word with’ is Ptonomy so you can work on unlocking your memories. Don’t you have a session scheduled right about now?”

“Keeping tabs on me, love?” he asked cheekily, earning himself another roll of Liza’s eyes. “It was Melanie that told you to stay away from me, wasn’t it?”

“I’m not answering that,” she said with forced nonchalance, neither wanting to confirm nor deny his suspicions, “I’m going to go now, Oliver.”

He let her turn away, but his voice stilled her before she got too far away: “How long am I supposed to try for, I wonder?”

She felt like she was playing right into what he wanted her to, but Liza continued listening—back to him and arms crossed.

“How long am I supposed to try to remember? How long am I supposed to wait for those memories to return, knowing they may never?” he asked, and Liza’s shoulder slumped as the nervous tension in her body started to escape her, struck by the honesty in his voice.

Was it a good point, or was it just what she wanted to hear?

“How long am I supposed to try to be the man I was, when I could instead by living in the present: as the man I am now?”

Liza squared her shoulders again before looking back at him, her bangs obscuring the look of patheticness—the despair but also hopefulness—on her face. “You need to talk to Melanie.”

She left for real this time, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say to stop her anyway.

* * *

> **_ At least there's always (music)__  
  
_ **

Oliver kept away from her for a while and Liza pondered whether it was because he had heeded her word and was trying to be discrete, or if his memory work had been improving and he was now using all his time to fix things with Melanie.

She also wasn’t sure... which option she preferred.

They both made her sad.

Lying in her bunk one night with the others all snoring softly around her —aside from Melanie, Oliver, and Cary, who all had their own separate rooms and didn’t sleep in the bunkroom—Liza was dead awake and couldn’t do a single thing to make herself tired. She was itchy and couldn’t sleep.

...And not the usual kind of itchy.

No, she was, unfortunately, feeling a bit pent up and sexually frustrated.

While Liza had never been one to exactly _crave_ or even _need_ sexual release, it had been becoming a bit more of a problem for her recently, both from being in contact with more people—people she liked and cared about—than ever before... and of course for the more obvious reason.

She loved Oliver. There was not point in trying to deny that, because it was beyond futile to even try to tell herself she wasn’t horribly in love with the man. And it would be especially useless in trying to deny it when even just the thought of his name was making Liza’s lower areas twitch in need, a warm wetness already clinging to her panties.

Being so near to him, without being allowed to be close to him either physically or emotionally, made Liza... itchy.

Horny was the less pleasant but more honest word.

Her hand twitched in thought, fingers trying to subtly move lower on herself but instead stopping to grab at the hem of her shirt as her brain caught up. She really shouldn’t do anything she wouldn’t want to be caught in the middle of while she was in the bunkroom.

Maybe the forest...? No, that was almost as exposed—no, even _more_ so than she was currently. At least in the bunkroom her bed had a privacy screen. And, Liza had to close her eyes and groan for thinking it and making things all that much worse for herself, the subject of her frustration was much more likely to “find” her there.

It would do her _no good_ to have him come across her, wittingly or not, with her own fingers sunk into herself, panting from the effort to get herself off.

The showers might be alright. Usually they _weren’t_ a safe option since the bathrooms were communal, but at this time of night the only other person likely to be awake aside from Liza herself was David. But he was a good friend and wouldn’t come to stick his nose where he shouldn’t.

He’d also have the good sense to know what she was up to and keep well away.

Liza was up and out of bed without much further internal debate. Next minute she was in the shower room and running the water until it was pleasantly warm against the back of her hand. It wasn’t as loud of a distraction as she’d have liked—and she was still right next to the bunkroom—but it would do for now.

Just a quick in and out—_heh_, she almost made herself laugh with that thought as she stripped, but when her shirt slipped past her sensitive nipples, she was suddenly much more concentrated on wiggling free of the rest of her pajamas as fast as possible so she could jump into the stall.

Usually Liza might be a little more coy with herself, pretending to try to give her usual shower routine a go before inevitably touching herself. But tonight she didn’t even bother.

She knew why she was here.

And that reason was currently throbbing between her legs, with a more painful urgency now that she was alone and comfortable enough to do something about it.

Liza’s left hand immediately fell to her folds, testing herself despite not being concerned with preparation at this point. Cutting right to the chase, she decided to forgo any kind of lengthening of her pleasure, simply inserting two fingers and reaching for that one particular spot she’d found she liked best.

This wasn’t for fun. The was necessary.

And the she’d go back to bed.

But that thought was not especially sexy, and Liza sighed in annoyance at her body not sprinting quite as quickly to the finish line as her mind wanted. But what should she expect—her body _never_ listened. At least, never aside from that time in the astral plane. When she’d been overjoyed to see her own feet and actually feel, for once, like she was in control of them, like they were connected to her brain.

How the black iron ladder had felt under her fingers—solid, chilly, untouched by imperfection or flaw.

How wonderfully cold it had felt inside that ice cube; how she could practically feel the crackling of it as it thawed and refroze, with the sound so close to her ears.

...How her Spaceman’s hands had felt on her cheeks as he—

_No_. No, Liza would _not_ go there.

But, almost as if to directly disobey her, Liza’s body gave a massive, shuddering quake that had her reaching her unengaged hand to her breast and dipping her fingers even further into her suddenly weeping cunt.

Ohhh but it wasn’t right. He was finally giving her room to breathe, but here she was drowning herself in horny, desperate thoughts of him.

Her body gave another needy ache, clenching and holding onto the sensation so long that it_ hurt_.

_It’s only in your mind_, she whispered consolingly to herself as her own hands—autonomous of her own will now—caressed her chest, the buds of her breasts hardening from the attention. Her touch was soft, asking permission.

Would Oliver be soft with her?

_Yes_—her fingers answered her, withdrawing from within her to instead rub languidly against her clit, slowing the pace but doubling her pleasure.

_At least, at first_. She extended a digit back inside herself, almost painfully slow.

_But then, at the sight of her gasping, begging for me, he’d get a little more hurried in his motions_. Another finger added. Her nipples were almost sore as she teased them. Her breath hitched; her eyes squeezed shut. But it was good, the pain was good. It was real.

_Maybe he’d get so excited that he’d accidentally hurt her, just a bit_. Liza pinched herself harder now, throwing her head back away from the cascade of water from the showerhead as she felt a coil begin, excruciatingly slowly, in her lower abdomen.

_He’s so sweet—so concerned with her feeling nothing but pleasure—that he’d stutter, apologize. But she’d lean up, biting his lip to assuage his fears and feel him moan into her_. Her focus was solely on her core now, soaking from both the shower and her own heightening arousal.

_She’d drag him across her body, feel him line himself with her entrance_. She made a strangled but joyous noise as she felt the coil tightening. Just a little...

_And then, finally, before he’d enter her, make her completely his, he’d say that he loves her, with that look in his eyes that proved it to her..._

Liza gasped, opening her eyes, mouth hanging open, as she looked down at herself.

What was she doing.

Liza withdrew her hands and held them away from herself, as though they had violated her.

But no, no one had violated her. _Liza_ was the one who had done wrong tonight. She was supposed to be putting aside her feelings for Oliver—locking them away, burying them deep down—but instead here she was... here she was...

Gods, she wanted to vomit. This was _wrong_—_so wrong_. What was she even thinking?

Oliver was not hers to fantasize about. Never would be. How could she betray both him and the woman who loved him—who was _married to him_. The same woman who had given her a home, a family.

How could she do this—even if it _was_ just in her mind?

Liza should know full well, after all the things she’d been shown since coming to Summerland, that the mind was a very real place with a very real presence. _Nothing _was _just in her mind_.

She had done something wrong, something _cruel_ this night.

...And the worst part? This realization hadn’t even stripped Liza of her arousal. No, she was still quivering in the aftershock of her self-denied orgasm. It wasn’t drifting away, hadn’t disappeared with a snap—it was holding on.

Holding her body hostage with want.

Not knowing what else to do—body craving, _demanding_, release but mind too weak and vulnerable to summon the wherewithal the just think of something or someone else and get it over with—Liza simply lowered herself to the floor, the water, now turning cold, raining down on her head as she cried.

She doesn’t remember how, or when, she was finally released from the grips of ebbing arousal and allowed to return to bed.

* * *

> **_Music, music, music, music_**  
**_ Music, music, music, music_**

“Hey, you like music, don’t you, Liza?”

Blinking herself out of the haze of fuzzy white nothingness tainting her brain, Liza looked up from the food she was staring at but not eating. Everyone was looking at her a little expectantly so she wasn’t sure who had spoken, but at least she had managed to hear the question.

What a strange topic of conversation. Strikingly banal for Summerland. Everyone liked music, right?

“Um...” she paused, setting down the cracker she was holding before her fingers started to break it into tiny pieces from anxiety, “Yes, I do.”

This felt like a setup. Or maybe Liza was just paranoid.

“But you’re always just using your headphones.” Ah, so it was Kerry that had asked. Liza was momentarily surprised to see her at the table, as she didn’t usually like to participate in meals. “You know you could use my stereo if you don’t have one.”

This was said as an aside, indicating it wasn’t the girl’s main line of questioning. “Yeah, I have to use the headphones... Appreciate the offer though, of course,” Liza answered, smiling a little.

“’Have to,’ you say? Wasn’t it ‘prefer’ the other day?”

The entire rest of the table was suddenly looking back and forth from Liza to Oliver, whose sudden appearance from the kitchen seemed to have upset her, although most of them couldn’t understand why.

“It’s to do with her powers,” said David, trying to be helpful and relieve some of the pressure from Liza by answering for her. It was vague enough, although truthful, and was said with enough implied forcefulness that no one else ventured to question her further about it.

Oliver may have sat down to eat with the rest of the group and engage in chit chat, but Liza was now engrossed completely with staring into her lunch. She wasn’t interested in eating any of it, but with the feeling of at least one set of eyes on her, she was unwilling to lift her head for anything.

She waited for the others to start leaving first, at least trying to maintain politeness by not rushing to finish and leave early. Finally sensing that she’d waited long enough, Liza gathered up her plate and deposited it in the dishwasher, moving her uneaten selection of fruit and cheese to a napkin, which she then wrapped up and stealthily placed in her pocket.

“You are actually eating, aren’t you?” a voice, suddenly right behind her, made her jump and squeak.

Liza turned around, panicked to find herself alone in the kitchen with Oliver. “Uh, I can’t—”

“Don’t worry, I _approved it with the boss_,” he cut her off, smiling at her. But there was a note of bitterness in his voice. “So... you’re eating well, yes? I do worry. While it wounds my pride greatly that you won’t eat what I cook, I’m more concerned to know whether you’re starving yourself.”

His apprehension about her health was... nice. Well-meaning. Very like him.

“I’m eating, Ollie.”

He relaxed a little, smile turning a but more genuine as Liza allowed herself the same. She thought she might have seen his hand twitch toward hers for a moment, but he instead slid it into the pocket of his slacks. Today’s suit was as immaculate as always: dark, earthy brown and much less laden with pockets and buttons and belts than what he usually wore. His ascot was paisley-patterned, with swirls of the prettiest silvers and navy blues. It looked new, or at least new_er_ than the rest of his wardrobe.

“You know, I’m going to have to start being embarrassed that I don’t have a special name to call you by,” he whispered, a sweet look entering his eyes that made Liza want to melt.

She didn’t need him to explain that he meant something he could use around the others, as his usual pet names for her were less than appropriate, given that they were only supposed to be friends. So instead she just shrugged, saying, “’Liza’ is already a nickname, and short enough on its own.”

His smile widened at that, seeming to have caught something hidden in her words. “Your full name is Eliza.”

No one called her that. Ever. But... she really loved the way it sounded in Oliver’s voice.

Her smile was shy. “I’d... like it if you called me that.”

Just you, though.

His was hopeful. “Well, then I will. If you keep using your name for me, that is.”

No one else can.

“I suppose I... can do that.”

Oh, the happiness on his face. Liza didn’t even need to guess why—she could see her own stupid grin reflected in his dark eyes. It made her heart squeeze.

She wanted him to hold her. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted them to whisper their love to each other.

Suddenly all her hard work to keep him away from her was burning down with a sudden spark—reduced to cinders, floating away on a breeze. All the walls and doors she’d put up to keep him out were falling away, like a broken, bloodied mirror in a now-distant memory.

_Knock, knock_.

She let him in, and she could instantly feel his hands on her face—just like always.

_I’ve got something I want to show you, love. Something I want to do for you. Do you trust that I understand what I’m doing, and accept what consequences may come from it?_

She wanted to say no, but there was something different about the way he was asking now. Like something had changed. But, even with that aside—

_I trust you. Lead on, Spaceman._

* * *

> ** _ Music, music, music, music_ **  
** _ Music, music, music, music _ **
> 
> ** _ Music _ **

** **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had originally worried about how I portray Melanie in this chapter, but then I watched S2E09 and saw how **b a d** she has it for Oliver (and honestly, **mood**, but come on dude, you can have your own life too, without him being your sole reason for living). So now I feel like this side of Melanie is totally possible and I feel way better about it. lol
> 
> Also: so I had originally promised smut to start in chapter 4 (if anyone has noticed the chapter names, I'm sure you can tell why that was. lol), but I want to give Oliver and Liza another chapter to kinda breathe before that happens, so it'll now be chapter 5. But the good news is that their relationship is largely untroubled from this point on, so we get a bit more of their adorable selves before we get to the _best_ stuff. lol
> 
> Hope you're all having a lovely day, week, month, and year! can't believe it's already August wtf


	4. Climax

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No content warnings! Go and read in peace, my dudes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! As always, thank you for all the wonderful hits and kudos! I truly appreciate you taking a look at this story, since it's so personal to me.
> 
> Just wanted to take a quick minute to thank my tumblr friend jemjemjemjemjemjemjem for giving me the drive to finish this chapter. They've become a great friend of mine and, although I've never said it to them, they were the main source of inspiration for me to get this chapter drafted and typed. I was feeling a little down after chapter 3, which didn't get quite the same level of draw as the previous two chapters (extra sad for me, because I felt like it was some of my best writing). But! Then I got a message on tumblr from Kat which completely lifted my spirits, and I feel like we've become great friends since then. So this chapter is dedicated to them! I truly, truly hope it's been worth the wait!
> 
> Have a wonderful day, everyone. Love you all dearly!

**A Dimension for Dance**

_Chapter 4- Climax_

_ [“Dancing on Glass” by St. Lucia](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9owGAK0n1QU) _

> ** _Science and reason will tell us so_ **   
** _ The blood in our veins are just chemicals_ **   
** _ Better believe I keep my demons to myself_ **   
** _ Better believe it's getting harder_ **   
** _ But I'm never gonna stop until it's broken_ **   
** _ Never gonna stop until it's broken_ **

** **

* * *

As it was, the place Oliver wanted to show Liza was somewhere she was already rather familiar with: her mind.

More specifically, the astral plane.

He promised not to take her as far in as he’d gone previously—lest they _both_ get sucked into the sea once more. But they’d still be going a bit deeper than Liza typically allowed herself. She wasn’t worried, however.

She had her Spaceman with her.

He got her settled comfortably in her bunk before departing for his own room, saying he’d call her and she could follow him once they were ready to go. Liza waited, curtains drawn around her bunk but the interior alight with a string of pretty, ethereally blue fairy lights. She tapped her fingers against her knuckles, humming to herself and growing impatient with giddiness.

But then she was hearing her name—with her mind, not her ears—and she was closing her eyes before letting her mind slip away.

She was expanding, branching out in every direction as she zeroed in on Oliver’s consciousness. Once she found it, she darted forward, pulling herself together into one point again, chasing his voice as he led her deeper into the mental realm.

Deeper.

Darker.

More constricting.

It was difficult for Liza to trespass this far without the aid of the drugs Cary had given her last time. It was a bit like trying to pull your thumb from the neck of a beer bottle: Where getting yourself in was relatively easy, but it was almost impossible to remove yourself without dislocating the digit—but in this case, it was the reverse, where the _in_ was the challenging part. It felt like there was _too much_ of Liza to fit through the narrowness of this part of the astral plane.

It felt like an air duct—dark, cold, and all too small. But also a bit like surgical tubing—rubbery and smooth, but also unpleasantly cloying, sticking to her body with a kind of wetness that made it hard to progress without chafing.

It was difficult to explain.

But following Oliver made it more manageable—less treacherous than if she’d been trying to do it on her own. And, as she vaguely identified a hand on hers (she seemed to be shifting now to take form) she breathed easier. The fear ebbed and her curiosity, excitement, returned.

And then she was stepping forward into a glowing, hazy kind of light with her now fully-formed feet—still in the same clothing she’d been wearing in the physical world. The only reason she even gave it any thought at all was because Oliver, appearing next to her, was now dressed in something much more akin to a leisure suit.

She giggled, amused by it, “You have a way with this place, don’t you?”

“_Teasing_?” he asked, aghast and affronted, hand to his chest, “What have I done to deserve this mockery?”

“I’m not mocking you, Ollie. Just making an observation,” she smiled as he dropped the act. She looked around them, attempting to guess what he wanted to show her before he could reveal it; it was difficult, however, as the only thing around was the dim light clinging to their immediate proximity like a bubble, extending no more than a foot away from them on all sides. Everything else was blackness.

“I see your mind working, dearest, but let me reveal it myself, hmm? Part of the fun.”

Liza hummed in her throat, smiling at him to show that she’d be patient and wait. He held her eyes a moment longer before snapping his fingers, a ripple of thought beginning to spread from that singular point—nearly so tangible in force that Liza could’ve sworn she could see it.

Around them, trickling away from them in a kind of liquid way—like a pool of water expanding in all directions as it overfilled its container—details began to emerge.

A bar with a dark, polished finish in front of a fully-stocked range of liquors, all stood on long, chromatic plinths like trophies, or artifacts.

Swiveling, colorful spotlights and novelty stage lights that somehow did almost nothing to hold back the darkness.

An entire line of speakers and monitors—from floor to ceiling—behind a DJ’s turntable.

And the best part: an illuminated checkerboard floor beneath her feet, which began to change color in time with the music now playing so lowly around her that Liza could only just notice it.

“You brought me... to a club?” Liza laughed, smile a little wry, “You brought me into the astral plane... to take me to an imaginary version of something that already exists in the world?” She trailed along behind Oliver as he slipped behind the bar, propping herself up in one of the fuzzy barstools—_very_ Oliver.

“If you keep acting so unimpressed, I’m going to have my heart broken, you know that?” he joked, watching her run a hand along the sleek, marbled bar top as he prepared a set of drinks.

“Not unimpressed,” she soothed him indulgently even though she knew his pride wasn’t actually wounded, “And to be fair, these _chairs_ are certainly only possible in the astral plane.”

He chuckled as he grabbed two glasses from under the bar, “What can I say? The physical world lacks my genius imagination.” Liza eyed the drink he’d made for her a little warily, feeling unease settle in her gut.

“Ollie, I know it’s just in my mind, but I can still get drunk in here,” she said, waving her hand as he suavely slid a rocks glass to her. She stopped short of saying that she couldn’t trust herself to get intoxicated in his presence anymore, but, as this was a realm entirely of the mental, this thought didn’t need to be said aloud for Oliver to hear it.

This time he actually did look upset, and Liza felt her pulse quickening with worry. “I’m not trying to get you drunk, love. I brought you here as a means to relax; I see how anxious you’ve been recently.”

She was waving apologetically at him, “I know, I’m—”

“—no, you didn’t know. You don’t need to apologize, I’m the one who let you get the wrong idea,” Oliver said, tapping his glass and diverting his eyes for a moment. He looked... almost sheepish. “So why don’t I stop playing the ‘mysterious, intriguing mastermind of the astral plane’ bit and just tell you plainly, yes?”

It wasn’t a question that he was asking her to answer, but the almost self-deprecating delivery was worrisome for Liza. Surprisingly cute, yes, but still out of character for him.

“Is everything ok, Ollie? Can I help, somehow?”

He stuttered in his movements, looking into her eyes before regaining his smile. “Here I am having you fret over me when this is supposed to be about you. _For_ you. Sometimes I believe I am not worthy of your grace, Eliza.”

He said it so tenderly that Liza was suddenly a blushing mess refusing to peek out from behind the long sleeves of her sweater. And that’s where she would have stayed—hidden from the smile in his eyes and his chuckling face—had he not came to stand beside her and taken her hands in his.

“I’m sorry for embarrassing you,” he said it sincerely, despite his grin.

“Not embarrassed...” she muttered a little stubbornly. It’s because...

Well she might as well say it herself this time before her own mind betrayed her again: “It’s because I’m not used to someone loving me the way you do.”

Honestly.

Openly.

Completely.

For just as she was.

For _everything_ she was, and not just parts of her.

The confession seemed to catch Oliver off-guard, as he was next turning to the side and taking a long drag from his nearly forgotten drink. Surely he had already known the depth of her feeling, though?

“A-anyway,” Oliver began again, voice smaller than usual. He cleared his throat. “I know you’ve been more upset than usual lately and, while I’m not sure why, I was hoping to help.”

Liza closed her eyes forcefully, taking a huge gulp of her drink. Don’t think of it. Don’t think of it. Don’t think of it.

Phrasing, Oliver. Phrasing.

“You dance to release your pent-up energy, yes?”

He meant when her powers build up too much for her to use them safely, but his word choice was making it harder, _much harder_, for Liza to steer her thoughts away from some unfortunate—_inappropriate_—word association. She clamped the lid on that thought as quickly as she could, but it was so forceful that it didn’t go unnoticed.

“Um, yes.”

He gave her a moment to elaborate, but finally continued once it became obvious that she wasn’t going to progress the conversation on her own, “Well—I figured we might make you a better place for it than that forest clearing, where you have to wear your headphones.”

“No, Ollie...” she was shaking her head, “You don’t understand: I don’t just prefer the headphones—I wasn’t completely truthful when I told you that, I’m sorry—it’s that I _need_ them for it to work.”

“Right, because you feel disconnected from your body.”

Liza stopped her mumbled explanation, surprised with him and how plainly he’d said it.

“It doesn’t feel right when you’re in the physical world. Doesn’t feel quite like yours, yes?”

That was it exactly, yes! But—

“David got me thinking about it—how he said it had to do with your powers. And that’s when I realized that you and I have the same... maladies? Proclivities? I still can’t remember the right word...”

So he also felt like...

“A brain that doesn’t need its body,” he nodded along to Liza’s unspoken question.

“I didn’t think...” she replied after a few moments, voice a little weak, “I didn’t know anyone felt the same as me. Didn’t realize I wasn’t...”

Alone.

Oliver smiled a little on one side of his mouth. “You’ve never been alone, my love.”

Because he’s always been there.

Fuck.

“Anyway...” Oliver continued, coughing briefly, “I brought you here so you can... _burn some energy_, so to speak.”

Liza kept her thoughts painfully PG as she joked back, “You seem very sure of yourself. And of this little conceit of yours working.”

It wasn’t that Liza hadn’t _tried_ to find alternate ways to express herself, or even just alternate ways to play her music. Or even, really, that she doubted Oliver and his abilities—especially given that he seemed to understand her plight.

But it just came down to the headphones being necessary, because they kept the sound close and blocked everything else out—it was simply the only way to isolate herself enough, with her body being as wildly uncooperative as it is.

But Oliver, never not completely sure of himself, simply smirked at her sass and pulled her by the hand out to the middle of the slowly pulsing dance floor. Liza cocked an eyebrow at him, wondering if he was going to ask to dance _with_ her. She wasn’t sure she could handle that, but she _was_ sure, however, that he knew as much and would let her go off on her own.

She was also sure, _of course_, that Oliver wasn’t the patient type and would probably, eventually, invite himself over. The man pursues his desires relentlessly.

_She should know_.

Liza couldn’t be sure that thought was totally her own, and as she blushed—Oliver grinning roguishly in victory—she tried to take interest in the rest of the imaginary dance club around her.

“Why don’t you pick some music, love? I get the feeling you and I have... very different tastes.”

That might be in part form the years-worth of age difference between them—not even counting the two decades during which he’d been frozen and hadn’t aged. None of that bothered Liza, but, seeing that it made Oliver a little uncomfortable to consider, she wordlessly imagined a vinyl record containing her favorite songs; then she imagined it before her.

...And there it was! A record suddenly manifesting and falling into her hands, held out to catch it—if a little clumsily from her surprise. She looked up into Oliver’s face, smiling so genuinely at her near-childlike wonder at her accomplishment.

“Wonderful job, dearest. Now, go put it on—_ah ah_, no moving. See if you can _think_ it into happening.”

For added measure, he was now holding her wrists to keep her still as she held the record. Liza would normally like to argue that it was quite an achievement for her to even have done as she already had—with this effectively being her first time deep enough into the astral plane to actually be able to alter it—but, with the feeling that this was some kind of test, Liza instead closed her eyes and thought _very hard_ about the record reappearing on the turntable on the other side of the club.

She thought.

And thought.

And groaned in annoyance as she thought even more.

“Relax, love. Don’t be so forceful. You can be gentle.”

His voice was such a comfort. His presence. Liza thought now of all the moments when her Spaceman had come to her in times of both joy and sadness. Repose and stress. The good times and the bad. Bliss _and_ tragedy.

He was like an anchor for her, but, even still, Liza was just so used to having to fight. If she ever wanted _anything_, she had to push—had to _pull_ it out of others. Nothing was easy. No happiness came to her without struggle. She never got to be... gentle.

“There you go, dearest. _Gentle_.”

He made her want to be that way. Well, to be _able_ to be that way. To be kind, to never have to be cruel. To get the chance to be soft, but not be weaker for it. To treat everyone sweetly, and not fear someone taking advantage. She wanted to love and be loved, just like any other person on the planet.

She wanted to see herself—know herself—just as Oliver saw her.

“Yes! Wonderful, darling! Brilliant job.”

It was only now that Liza noticed the subtle weight of the record had left her hands to instead be replaced by Oliver’s, squeezing her fingers to prompt her to open her eyes. And she did so just as music began to filter from the speakers—still soft enough that she didn’t need to strain to hear him.

“Excellent, excellent job, Eliza.”

> _ [I miss when I saw your face](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJon-qilbRk) _   
_ Drunk in our Sunday's best_   
_ All of those chemicals_   
_ I snorted right off your chest_

Oliver made a bit of a face at the lyrics, which made Liza giggle heartily.

“It appears I was correct in my assumption,” he said as a joke, causing Liza to laugh harder.

> _Oh that was beautiful_   
_ We were young, we were beautiful_   
_ Oh that was beautiful_   
_ We were young, we were beautiful_

“You are acting quite the _old man_, Ollie.”

He kind of liked that, it seemed—his smile twisting in humor before he withdrew his hands from hers, casting them out over the dance floor and walking back to the bar. “Well, don’t let this old grump ruin your fun. I’ll just be over here... _resting my feet_.”

Oh sure. Resting his feet and _watching_.

> _In your head it's Coachella every weekend_   
_ Free spirits and flowers on your head_   
_ I love the way that you laughed with me_   
_ I miss the way that you laughed with me_   
_ And we sang (oh, ah, oh, ah)_   
_ And we sang (oh, ah, oh, ah)_

This song was a pretty good warm-up, and if Liza was ever asked, she’d say it was done purposefully. However, with her being as inexperienced as she was with using her powers this way, it was just the first song that had come to her mind.

She closed her eyes, her back to Oliver, and, almost solely from muscle-memory, lifted her hands to her ears, as if to hold her headphones in place as she got started.

> _A careless summer and a wild heart_   
_ I'm at my best with you by my side_   
_ We danced and we lost ourselves_   
_ And loved all through the night_
> 
> _Oh that was beautiful_   
_ We were young, we were beautiful_   
_ Oh that was beautiful_   
_ We were young, we were beautiful_

Liza’s dad had always told her she was a less than graceful dancer. She tended to be all shoulders and hands, never quite feeling feminine enough to be comfortable with her hips.

But there was something about this song—and, perhaps, feeling Oliver’s gaze on her—that made Liza braver. More in-tune with her body and how it moved.

She began to utilize more of the dance floor—empty as it was for her use. And her own body.

> _In your head it's Coachella every weekend_   
_ Free spirits and flowers on your head_   
_ I love the way that you laughed with me_   
_ I miss the way that you laughed with me_   
_ And we sang (oh, ah, oh, ah)_   
_ And we sang (oh, ah, oh, ah)_
> 
> _In your head it's Coachella every weekend_   
_ Free spirits and flowers on your head_   
_ I love the way that you laughed with me_   
_ I miss the way that you laughed with me_   
_ And we sang (oh, ah, oh, ah)_   
_ And we sang (oh, ah, oh, ah)_
> 
> _In your head it's Coachella every weekend_   
_ In your head it's Coachella every weekend_

It was only now that Liza _truly_ realized just how easy this was.

There was no struggle to move her body with the music. There was no fight to keep her brain focused on the song. There wasn’t a single moment in which she lost the beat, frantically skipping about on one foot until she found it again.

And she could practically _feel_ Oliver’s smug smile behind her as she realized it.

However, rather than let herself be petulant and a bit stubborn, like she usually was, she instead allowed herself a smile—small and secret, as she was still turned away from him—and gave over to the feeling that he did truly know what was best.

But, if she was going to let him revel in his own pride, she was going to have... a little _fun_ with it, too.

> _ [When my baby is a mess](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPJ7m4wlWNU) _   
_ My baby is a dancing queen_   
_ When my baby wears a dress_   
_ It's like she's not even a human being_

If Oliver could make this entire place and she could summon a record out of nothing, Liza could also get away with a little costume change. Hell, she’d basically seen Oliver do the same already.

She didn’t open her eyes to see it happen, but she could feel the material—silky and beautiful and delicate—form on her, trickling down from her shoulders to just above her knees like water—not cold like stream water, but just as pure and clear.

> _Nobody else_   
_ Nobody else_   
_ Nobody else_   
_ Has you down, but me_

And when she was done transforming into something a little more befitting the venue, she felt the eyes on her, the gaze that held her, feeling just that bit more... invested. It wasn’t just that she was being watched now—she was being _observed_.

> _I behold the beauty_   
_ But the beauty got a hold on me_   
_ With all the other boys in the running_   
_ Never thought this could happen at 20_
> 
> _Nobody else_   
_ Nobody else_   
_ Nobody else_   
_ Has you down, but me_

Usually Liza would be working up a sweat at this point in her little routine, but not only was she sure that physical exhaustion simply wasn’t a problem in the astral plane, she was also feeling more warm than tired. And it had everything to do with the heated, fiery eyes fixated on her, like a specimen under a magnifying glass—the beam of light above her narrowed to a pinprick and focused on her form as she danced across the glass floor, lighting up in the full spectrum of color in time with the music she chose.

> _When my baby is a mess_   
_ My baby is a dancing queen_   
_ When my baby wears a dress_   
_ It's like she's not even a human being_
> 
> _Nobody else_   
_ Nobody else_   
_ Nobody else_   
_ Has you down_   
_ Has you down_   
_ Has you down, but me_
> 
> _Singing a oh_   
_ I've been singing a oh_   
_ I've been singing a oh_

True to his unspoken word, Oliver was still—somehow—staying put in his barstool. But, now, Liza was curious if she... _could_ get him to come to her. First, that is. Feeling as confident as she now was, she didn’t doubt that she’d eventually take matters into her own hands. But... it was more fun to be chased.

Next, Liza was deciding to try and test those waters—feeling young and daring and in-control and... well, just—just, so, so in love with the man. She _wanted_ to be chased. She _wanted_ to be desired. She _wanted _to be wanted.

And, she wanted him to show her that.

> _ [It feels so good baby, coming back to life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yRxGj2zo4s) _   
_ And it feels so good lately, coming back to life_   
_ I keep coming back good lately, coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good baby, coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good_
> 
> _Good, good, good, it feels_   
_ But this time I feel like I’m coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good, good, good, good_   
_ But this time I feel like I’m coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good_

She had wanted this next song to be something closer to his _tastes_, as he’d called it; and she thought she had done a rather good job at it. Not one-hundred percent his style, but enough to get him thinking. Liza also just happened to think that she looked rather appealing when dancing to it.

Everything about the instrumentation on this song was perfect.

The bass was booming.

The beat was at just the right speed.

The melody was funky and fun and unforgettable.

And the lyrics spoke the words Liza were too shy to say aloud. At least for the moment.

> _I’ve had to look far away_   
_ Another time dimension in this time and space_   
_ When I heard your voice again in reality_   
_ It was loud and clear that you were crying out for me_
> 
> _Did you call my name, Did you call me twice _   
_ Did you call me three times, Must’ve been a thousand times_   
_ To make me real_   
_ Just find a light_   
_ Your love and hope for me_   
_ Has cheated death and brought me back_

Liza felt like she was taking up the entire club now. It was like there were other people surrounding her, as she was moving so quickly, so ecstatically, so fluidly around on the checkered floor. It was like there were multiple projections of her as she moved. Like still-frames from a movie—like stop motion animation. She was everywhere.

But while she was actually still alone, she couldn’t help her smile. Wide and chaotic and so blissful in this moment. It was like electricity.

> _It feels so good baby, coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good lately, coming back to life_   
_ I keep coming back good lately, coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good baby, coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good_
> 
> _Good, good, good, it feels_   
_ But this time I feel like I’m coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good, good, good, good_   
_ But this time I feel like I’m coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good_
> 
> _I’m coming back for my throne_   
_ Coming back for what is mine to me and nothing more (once more)_   
_ When I heard your voice again in reality_   
_ It was loud and clear that you were crying out for me_

And she really, truly was. Calling for him.

And, finally, she felt his unbroken line of sight shift as he set down his drink and came to idle at the edge of the dance floor, watching her finish out the song solo.

Waiting for her to call him again. Just once more.

> _Did you call my name, Did you call me twice _   
_ Did you call me three times, Must’ve been a thousand times_   
_ To make me real_   
_ Just find a light_   
_ Your love and hope for me_   
_ Has cheated death and brought me back_
> 
> _It feels so good baby, coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good lately, coming back to life_   
_ I keep coming back good lately, coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good baby, coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good_
> 
> _Good, good, good, it feels_   
_ But this time I feel like I’m coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good, good, good, good_   
_ But this time I feel like I’m coming back to life_   
_ And it feels so good_

She’d built herself up plenty of confidence at this point, but she still couldn’t quite trust her voice not to betray the nervousness inside her—the fear that she had misconstrued Oliver’s intentions for bringing her here. So the music changing to something he’d respond to, and a beckoning finger, was all the signal she gave.

But it was all he needed.

> _ [Can you feel the pain?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRP9k9nlAfE) _   
_ See the mess and trouble in your brain_   
_ Anger you retain, pressure rocks you like a hurricane_   
_ Is it time for you to jump into the next train?_   
_ Change of head, make a stand_   
_ I can see your heart change_   
_ (Wake up!)_   
_ No more nap, your turn is coming up_   
_ You feel lazy but stop the fantasies and bubble butts_   
_ If you need to hear: go for it_   
_ I will teach you how to feel the thing so close to you, connect it all!_

Her hand was in his, not unlike the first time he’d danced with her: back in the woods, right after she’d woken him up. But this time his other hand was on her waist, gliding softly over the silky fabric of her mind-created dress—swishing and swirling between them as him guided her around the floor.

“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” he quipped, but noticeably sans-pet name. But Liza didn’t worry over it. There was something strained—something changed—in his voice. And the change was in her favor.

She could feel his pulse flittering, racing, through his fingertips.

“Absolutely,” she responded, smile catching on her lips as she looked up into his face, “That _was_ the purpose of this whole thing, wasn’t it, Ollie?”

> _Every day is a miracle_   
_ (Help one another)_   
_ Connect back with the people_   
_ (Give it to your lover)_   
_ And all the people you miss_   
_ (Let's come around)_   
_ (Act like a brother)_   
_ Don't think you're invisible_   
_ (Help one another)_   
_ Connect back with the people_   
_ (Give it to your lover)_   
_ And all the people you miss_   
_ (Let's come around)_

“Well, the idea _started_ with making a dimension in which even _you_ could dance,” he quipped, and Lydia glared at him playfully.

“Was that it?”

His smirk was both a response to the implication in her voice as it was to the charming, disarming nature of the music around them. It was light-hearted enough to be innocuous, but, just under the surface, there was a bubbling, driving current of suggestion.

Not unlike the words they were speaking. Or the way he was looking at her.

> _Would you show your head?_   
_ Would you text me from your rest bed?_   
_ Running from the debt in the battle of cyber heads_   
_ You should think twice_   
_ 'Cause they will make your brain melt_   
_ New device, better price_   
_ Keep you feeling impressed_   
_ Stop it all_   
_ Every day we live a miracle_   
_ Unpredictable_   
_ You don't need an upgrade anymore_   
_ Can't you see the link?_   
_ Don't worry_   
_ I will teach you how to take the pill to feel the thrill and touch it all!_

“It was also to help you burn off all that troublesome energy you’ve been building up, which you’ve only been doing from trying to keep away from me,” he finally responded, drawing a chuckle from Liza despite the embarrassing truth hidden in his joking tone, “Yes, love: that’s my intent... In part.”

“Oh, ‘in part,’ hmm? So, what else is making up the rest of your little scheme here?”

> _Every day is a miracle_   
_ (Help one another)_   
_ Connect back with the people_   
_ (Give it to your lover)_   
_ And all the people you miss_   
_ (Let's come around)_   
_ (Act like a brother)_   
_ Don't think you're invisible_   
_ (Help one another)_   
_ Connect back with the people_   
_ (Give it to your lover)_   
_ And all the people you miss_   
_ (Let's come around)_

Instead of replying to her, perhaps looking a little nervous—but only for a moment—Oliver instead held their joined hands above her head, spinning her around backwards and drawing her closer against him, their feet tapping in time to the music as their hips swayed, perfectly in sync with each other.

“Well, when last we spoke—that day in the forest—you had told me I needed to talk to Melanie.”

Liza was ashamed of herself for letting her smile fall, just the tiniest bit. But she continued to listen, even as the feeling of Oliver’s beard scratching at the side of her head made her think shameful, dishonest things in her private mind. None of this was helped by him now bringing an arm around the front of her, holding her stomach as they moved, drawing her that much closer to him.

> _Every day is a miracle_   
_ (Help one another)_   
_ Connect back with the people_   
_ (Give it to your lover)_   
_ And all the people you miss_   
_ (Let's come around)_   
_ (Act like a brother)_   
_ Don't think you're invisible_   
_ (Help one another)_

“So, I did as you said. We talked. And we both agreed, together...”

Liza felt her breath leaving her body, refusing to replace the air in her lungs as she waited for him to finish his sentence.

“That it would be best to end things.”

And then her soul was slamming back into her so quickly that she actually thought she might choke.

> _Connect back with the people_   
_ (Give it to your lover)_   
_ And all the people you miss_   
_ (Let's come around)_

Liza turned herself in Oliver’s arms, the hand not on her back now coming to settle at her waist, before she was moving both of her own to either side of his face—not unlike he had done with her the first time she’d ventured to the astral plan—and kissing him with a fierceness she wouldn’t have thought she had in her.

But her Spaceman, her Oliver, brought it out of her.

And he matched it.

* * *

> ** _How long 'til we learn_ **   
** _ Dancing is dangerous_ **   
** _ How long 'til we find_ **   
** _ The devil inside of us_ **   
** _ How high is too low_ **   
** _ We're not that young_ **   
** _ So we're never gonna stop never gonna stop never gonna stop_ **   
** _ Until we break it_ **
> 
> ** _ Dancing on glass  
Dancing on glass _ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next chapter is basically just smut. lol  
check back for it in a few weeks!

**Author's Note:**

> Hey hey hey, come check out my [tumblr](https://alien-ariel7.tumblr.com/). I post all my supplementary materials here, like a concept image for Liza if ya waaaant it. Also updates on whether I may need to take a hiatus, but I don't expect that at the moment; this is a pretty short fic for me and I'll probably breeze through writing what I haven't already prepared. I've got my own [tag](https://alien-ariel7.tumblr.com/tagged/A-Dimension-for-Dance) just for this story and everything.
> 
> Comments always appreciated, friends. I hope you all have a lovely day!


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